The Radicalisation of Young Women

"Why does 25% AfD among young men spark a thousand "what is going on with young men?" posts yet Die Linke 34% among young women generates...nothing at all? Yes, young men voting for the radical right is an important phenomenon. But so is young women going rad left *at even higher rates*." So writes Rob Ford, reflecting on the marked gender split among 18-24 year olds at Sunday's general election in Germany. The reasons why few if any have remarked on this trend probably has something to do with politics never taking women that seriously. But what is driving the gender divergence - also seen in this country - that sees younger women bolshevising at the rate of knots?

Three quick and dirty interlinked hypotheses.

1. Maria writes "I’m so looking forward to all the articles on why young women are being ‘pushed into the arms of the far-left’ due to their ‘legitimate concerns’ about things like bodily autonomy, rape culture and the hollowing out of state welfare protections, right?". Yes. Young women are encountering misogyny every day among their peer groups and the swill of social media. The election of the misogynist-in-chief in the USA, the antics of Elon Musk, and the widely publicised rejection of the gender equity lip service paid by American tech companies for a dorkish, inauthentic "masculine energy" reinforces the message that women don't matter. This is the background noise to efforts by the far right to politicise young men as incels and misogynists. While this commands the chin-stroking and concerned frowns, political science and political sociology has overlooked how this is politicising women in the opposite direction. Precisely because the far right politics of gender means stuffing women into a narrow straitjacket that comes in two sizes only: pornified objects and tradwives. Young women's embrace of the radical left is not just a reaction against forcing on them a stultifying subaltern identity. It's a realisation by them that contemporary misogyny is inseparable from the politics of oligarchy. That taking on patriarchal social relations is inseparable from the struggle against capital. They can clearly see who is pushing this drivel and why.

2. For well over a decade, concerns with the "new misogyny" has found a ready explanation in the changes to work and configuration of the labour market. Less attention, however, has been paid to the consequences this has had for women. On paper, immaterial labour - the dominance of 21st century work by the production of knowledge, services, care, social relations affords some advantages to those whose childhood and teen socialisation has stressed the importance of caring for others, having emotional intelligence, and developing a more pro-social as opposed to competitive, atomised individuality. Which largely remains the norm for the upbringing of girls. As noted many times here before, for the new working class of immaterial labourers/socialised workers, social liberalism is the practical everyday consciousness. Workers are required to mobilise their social being, their sociality in the service of their employer to collaborate with others and meet the needs of clients/customers. This is a set of tools capital cannot own, though it won't be for want of trying. Therefore efforts that the right use to mobilise its supporters. I.e. Making scapegoats out of vulnerable minorities is one reason why younger cohorts are repulsed by centrists and the mainstream right. However, survey after survey shows women are less susceptible to racism, anti-immigration politics, and transphobia. Why? Because they are more more likely to have been socialised into empathetic structures of feeling than men, which are continually reinforced by the capacities required by contemporary work cultures. And so women are more likely to feel an affinity between the belittling of minorities and their life experiences of becoming women, and draw the necessary (radical) political conclusions.

3. Younger women are more likely to go to university than men. This is partly because the growth areas in the professions - consistent with the rise of immaterial labour - offer a growing array of gender normative pathways to career success. More people with people skills are needed than ever before. However, as Dan Evans has rightly observed, there are not enough graduate positions to go around with many stuck for years, if not forever in non-graduate jobs after leaving university. The outcome of this is downward social mobility and a radical frustration with the world that, inter alia, provided many a shock troop to Jeremy Corbyn's campaigns. This is still true, whether we're talking about the UK or Germany. Because of the gender imbalance in universities, this crisis of the graduate is going to be disproportionately felt by young women. Their expectations frustrated and ambitions stymied, why not a radical politics that provides convincing explanations for why they are in this predicament? Certainly makes more sense than anything the far right and the mainstream have to say.