Hello and thank you for downloading the more or less podcast.

We are your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Harford.

Traditionally, men and women of a similar age have tended to have similar political views.

But around the world men and women under the age of 30 are starting to diverge on some of those

views.

That's a new and surprising trend.

While older people, male or female, still tend to have similar views to one another.

Just in this last decade, we're starting to see a more liberal or progressive shift among young women and in

some countries a more conservative shift among young men. John Byrne Murdoch is a

colonist and chief data reporter at the Financial Times.

It does seem to be a global phenomenon and that doesn't mean every single country in the world,

but it is something that we see in the UK, we see some evidence of it in the US, Germany, Poland, Spain, plenty of it in Europe, but also as far

east as countries like China and Korea and even in North Africa, so Egypt and Tunisia show similar things.

So it does seem to be something that is taking off right across the globe.

Is this because women have shifted their views towards the left or that men, young men,

have shifted their views towards the right?

It's a really tricky one and it depends on exactly what measures we use.

So in the US, Germany and in particular the UK where young men are still considerably more

liberal than conservative, the gap is really caused more by women being even that much further towards the

liberal side of politics, the progressive side. Whereas in Korea we see this more

in some of these other countries in Asia and Africa for example, a big part of this shift is also men turning to the right.

John Byrne Murdoch's sources include social and political surveys around the world,

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