- Thinking About It by Zee Feed
- Posts
- That gender survey is BS.
Everyone is talking about the huge Ipsos survey that came out this week, reported on in the Guardian, that supposedly found Gen Z men hold more regressive ideas about gender than older generations. You can read about it here: Gen Z males twice as likely as baby boomers to believe wives should obey husbands.
The survey about gender beliefs was conducted by Ipsos in the UK and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s Business School at King’s College London, to mark International Women’s Day (which is today). It’s part of this ongoing theme of journalism and content that wants to frame Gen Z men as uniquely scary, red-pilled and misogynistic. I’m on the record as being very skeptical of this type of content.
So, what if I told you the scary results of this survey were bullshit? Or at the very least, overly-generalised?
How was the survey conducted?
Ipsos surveyed 23,268 people aged 16-74, from 29 countries. The surveys were delivered using an online platform (excluding in India, where about 1800 people were interviewed face-to-face and only 400 took an online survey). It was conducted at the end of December 2025 and beginning of January 2026. You can see the entire poll for yourself here.
The countries included are: Japan, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Mexico, Spain, US, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Malaysia, Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Sweden, Turkey, Thailand, and India.
The Kings College of London highlighted a few key results in their editorial on the survey:
31% of Gen Z men agree that a wife should always obey her husband and 33% say a husband should have the final word on important decisions;
43% of Gen Z men agree that ‘young men should try to be physically tough, even if they’re not naturally big’ compared to 32% of all respondents and 28% of Gen Z women.
21% of Gen Z men believe that men who take part in caregiving for children are less masculine than those who do not, compared with just 8% of Baby Boomer men
These are the elements that most of the media reporting on this survey have focused on. I can understand why – it sounds really bad! And, perhaps more importantly in many newsrooms, it fits into the narrative that Gen Z men are heading in a toxic, more dangerous direction. But when you flip the results around, they don’t seem as alarming:
69% of Gen Z men do not think a wife should always obey her husband;
57% of Gen Z men do not think ‘young men should try to be physically tough, even if they’re not naturally big’
79% of Gen Z men believe that men who take part in caregiving for children are just as masculine than those who do not.
Beyond that, there are bigger problems with this survey that make me wonder if we can actually learn anything from the results.
The non-existent Gen Z man
The biggest problem is how the results have been broken down. For each question, Ipsos has displayed the results in three ways: a global average, each country’s average, and a global gender-generational average.
Let’s simplify by looking at one question: “Do you agree or disagree with the following? Men who take part in caregiving for children are less masculine than men who don’t”.
Global country average: On average, 14% of respondents from all countries agreed with the statement (page 62)
Country averages: 12% of respondents in Australia agreed with the statement, 49% agreed in India, 4% agreed in Belgium, etc (page 63)
Gender-generational average: 21% of Gen Z men from all countries agreed with the statement, 8% of Baby Boomer men from all countries agreed. (page 64)
We never get the results by country and gender and generation, despite the fact that the country averages show that people in different countries have extremely different views. (This might be the most dumbfoundingly obvious sentence I have written in my entire journalism career.)
To reiterate: This survey is saying that 21% of Gen Z men believe looking after kids is emasculating. But if that’s way less likely if you’re in Australia or Belgium and way more likely in India and Malaysia, then which young men is it actually talking about?
I’ve written before about why it’s unhelpful to assume the social and political trends in the US will apply directly to Australia, because the differences in our social norms, institutions and systems account for really big changes in how things play out in one country versus another.
Even that is allowing for the fact that there are important cultural similarities between the US and AU. So why would it be useful for a study to generalise across countries as different as Malaysia and the Netherlands and Turkey, without accounting for or attempting to explain any of those differences? What conclusion are you supposed to draw from these “stats” about the young Australian men in your friend group, family, workplace, classroom or sports team?
Remember: each country’s results are not broken down by generation.
So the “Gen Z man” being referred to in this study exists everywhere and nowhere at once. He is completely independent of cultural norms, societal norms, education levels, wealth, politics. He is an impossibility that you are being asked to judge.
Even worse, the methodology notes that only 16 of the 29 countries have a sample size that is representative of the actual demographics of those places (Australia is one of these countries). For the other 13 countries, the composition of people surveyed is not representative. Ipsos has applied weighting to the results to try to get it to better represent those populations, but that means individual responses are extrapolated in ways that may not necessarily match reality.
All of this messiness is bundled into the generational results.
Personally, I think that makes it almost useless.
There are some other issues with the survey that are worth noting:
As researcher John San Nicolas points out, Ipsos uses an opt-in online survey which puts it at risk of getting responses from those who are a) very online, and b) interested in ‘gender discourse’. A potential overrepresentation of very online men who are interested in gender discourse could skew the results to reflect more sexism than exists in the offline world. There has been some writing about how online polls can misrepresent young people’s views in particular.
Also, Ipsos has run this survey every year since 2019. There are a handful of questions that have remained the same over that time, and they show the year-on-year change in responses (pages 5-13). But the media push for the article does not focus on the gradual change over time as these have been relatively minor. Instead, Ipsos and the media are focusing on the generational aspect for which they don’t appear to have any data over time.
So why focus on the generational gender gap? To me, it’s a new version of intergenerational warfare content.
It plays into the fears about young people — about young men — for clicks and engagement, without providing any real insight. Misogyny is serious and erodes society. It makes us all worse off. Here’s the thing: the question being asked now is not simply if misogyny still exists (of course it does), but whether young men today are more sexist than older men.
Unfortunately, this survey by its design cannot interrogate that question.