For some context, Gaby Hinscliffe (Guardian columnist) interviewed young women supported by the Young Women's Trust (a charity that helps young women on low pay or unemployed to find better jobs), other young women who attended this year's Green Party Conference (so already pretty bought in to the Green Party) and sixth formers from Bristol (a city that she described as "diverse and left leaning").
She spoke to a researcher who had been doing some polling of young people, who said that while there was a difference in right/left leaning among young people it was really only a matter of degree. She said:
"We asked young people to place themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 from left to right. Most of men and women put themselves in the centre, which I always find quite important to point out.
We did see slight divergences on the left and right. So young men put themselves on the left side of the spectrum 13% of the time whereas young women put themselves 20% of the time. So a bit more left leaning among women.
And on the right it was opposite, young men put themselves there 26% of the time and only 15% of the women did."
Gaby Hinscliffe then asked about which specific issues were young people mostly concerned about when it came to voting. The reply was that the top five were:
"For young men, inflation & cost of living is top then healthcare, crime, housing affordability and then immigration & asylum.
Whereas for young women it is healthcare, inflation & cost of living, housing affodability, mental health and then crime."
She then interviewed Prof Rosie Campbell who is Professor of Politics at Kings College London and asked if this left/right split was new.
"In the period that we've had good data - in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, women were slightly more likely to vote for the Conservatives than men and then, by the 1970s, that gap largely disappeared.
But when we got to the 2017 election the traditional gap reversed and more women voted Labour and more men voted Conservative. That was also true in 2019.
2024 was a little bit different"
According to Gaby Hinscliffe, the British Electoral Study showed that there was a shift at the last election. Although, overall, more women voted for the main parties than men did around a quarter of women aged 18-25 voted Green, twice as many as young men. She asked Prof Campbell what was driving that change?
"My suspicion is, although it has only been happening very recently so it's hard to get good quality data, is that the trends that are pushing young men to the right might equally be pushing young women to the left."
Is it young men driving that or is it young women?
"If we look at the last election, men overall were more likely to support Reform but when we look inside the generations, young women were significantly more likely to support Green than older women. So I do think that we pay a lot of attention to young men but actually it might be young women that are moving faster."
Another factor was the way that young people get there political content - typically for young people that's through social media. The algorithms these platforms use to push content into people's feeds are geared to give people more of what they seem to like. If young men and young women are living in separate online worlds, could that explain why they're moving apart in real life?
She then interviewed Zarah Sultana, the MP for Coventry South (who runs a new party with Jeremy Corbyn), who explained how important it was to her to have such a large social media platform to speak directly to young women to get points over to them.
She also interviewed Carla Denyer, Green MP for Bristol, who spoke about misogyny and VAWG being a big driver for young women wanting to vote Green.
She then got on to interviewing some individual young women and none of them mentioned trans issues. There was a lot more emphasis on the Middle East.