In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.

By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.

King’s initial efforts have been mirrored across the country. In 2024, the U.S. spent more than $30 billion putting laptops and tablets in schools. But more than a quarter-century and numerous evolving models of technology later, psychologists and learning experts see a different outcome than the one King intended. Rather than empowering the generation with access to more knowledge, the technology had the opposite effect.

Earlier this year, in written testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath said that Gen Z is less cognitively capable than previous generations, despite its unprecedented access to technology. He said Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the previous one.

While skills measured by these tests, like literacy and numeracy, aren’t always indicative of intelligence, they are a reflection of cognitive capability, which Horvath said has been on the decline over the last decade or so.

Citing Program for International Student Assessment data taken from 15-year-olds around the world and other standardized tests, Horvath noted not only dipping test scores, but also a stark correlation in scores and time spent on computers in school, such that more screen time was related to worse scores. He blamed students having unfettered access to technology that atrophied rather than bolstered learning capabilities. The introduction of the iPhone in 2007 also didn’t help.

“This is not a debate about rejecting technology,” Horvath wrote. “It is a question of aligning educational tools with how human learning actually works. Evidence indicates that indiscriminate digital expansion has weakened learning environments rather than strengthened them.”

The writing was perhaps already on the wall. Fortune reported in 2017 that Maine’s public school test scores had not improved in the 15 years the state had implemented its technology initiative. Then-governor Paul LePage called the program a “massive failure,” even as the state poured money into contracts with Apple.

Gen Z will now have to face the ramifications of eroding learning capabilities. The generation has already been hit hard by the transformations of the 21st century’s other technological revolution: generative AI.

Early data from a first-of-its-kind Stanford University study published last year found AI advancements to have “significant and disproportionate impact on entry-level workers in the U.S. labor market.” But a less capable population means more than just poorer job prospects and fewer promotions, Horvath warned; it endangers how humans are able to overcome existential challenges in the decades to come.

“We’re facing challenges more complex and far-reaching than any in human history—from overpopulation to evolving diseases to moral drift,” he told Fortune. “Now, more than ever, we need a generation able to grapple with nuance, hold multiple truths in tension, and creatively tackle problems that are stumping the greatest adult minds of today.”

Technology’s impact on learning

Classroom technology usage has ballooned in recent years. A 2021 EdWeek Research Center poll of 846 teachers found 55% said they are spending one to four hours per day with educational tech. Another quarter reported using the digital tools five hours per day.

While teachers may be intending for these tools to be strictly educational, students often have different ideas. According to a 2014 study, which surveyed and observed 3,000 university students, students engaged in off-task activities on their computers nearly two-thirds of the time.

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Horvath blamed this tendency to get off-track as a key contributor to technology hindering learning. When one’s attention is interrupted, it takes time to refocus. Task-switching also is associated with weaker memory formation and greater rates of error. Grappling with a challenging singular subject matter is hard, Horvath said. For the best learning to happen, it’s supposed to be.

“Unfortunately, ease has never been a defining characteristic of learning,” he said. “Learning is effortful, difficult, and oftentimes uncomfortable. But it’s the friction that makes learning deep and transferable into the future.”

Sustained attention to a singular subject is anathema to how technology today has been deployed, argues Jean Twenge, San Diego State University psychology professor studying generational differences and the author of 10 Rules for Raising Kids in a High-Tech World. More time on screens isn’t just ineffective in facilitating learnings; it’s counterproductive.

“Many apps, including social media and gaming apps, are designed to be addictive,” Twenge told Fortune. “Their business model is based on users spending the most time possible on the apps, and checking back as frequently as possible.”

A Baylor University–led study published in November 2025 uncovered why this is: TikTok required the least amount of effort to use, even less than Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, by balancing relevant videos with surprising and unexpected content.

Concerns over social media addiction have become so dire that 1,600 plaintiffs, across 350 families and 250 school districts, filed a lawsuit alleging Meta, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube created addictive platforms leading to mental health challenges like depression and self-harm in children.

Solving the tech crisis

Horvath proposed a swath of solutions to Gen Z’s tech problem, at least as it pertains to classroom use. Congress, he suggested, could impose efficacy standards to fund research on what digital tools are actually effective in the classroom. The legislature could also require strong limits on tracking behavior, building profiles, and collecting data on minors using tech.

Some schools have taken matters into their own hands. As of August 2025, 17 states have cracked down on cellphone use in school, banning the technology during instructional time, and 35 states have laws limiting the use of phones in the classroom. In fact, more than 75% of schools have said they have policies prohibiting cellphone use for nonacademic purposes, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, though enforcing those bans has been met with variable success.

Ultimately, Horvath said, the loss of critical thinking and learning skills is less of a personal failure and more of a policy one, calling the generation of Americans educated with gadgets victims of a failed pedagogical experiment.

“Whenever I work with teenagers I tell them, ‘This is not your fault. None of you asked to be sat in front of a computer for your entire K-12 schooling,’” Horvath said. “That means we…screwed up—and I genuinely hope Gen Z quickly figures that out and gets mad.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

For today’s college students, attitudes toward AI can seem paradoxical.

On one hand, they’ve made their ire toward the technology clear: Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was met with hisses during his commencement remarks at the University of Arizona’s graduation ceremony on Sunday when he invoked the inevitability of a future with artificial intelligence.

“The question is not whether AI will shape the world. It will,” Schmidt said, pausing for a moment as students booed. “The question is whether you will have shaped artificial intelligence.”

Just days earlier, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield told graduating students at the University of Central Florida, “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” One audience member jeered in response, “AI sucks.”

But the outward disgust toward the AI boom doesn’t tell the full story of the 2026 graduating class’s relationship to AI. The same cohort is also adopting the technology at a rapid clip, with 57% of U.S. college students reporting using the AI tools in their coursework weekly, and 20% using it daily, according to the Lumina Foundation-Gallup 2026 State of Higher Education study published last month.

Some are even using this tool illicitly in the classroom. Jacob Shelley, an associate professor of health law at Western University, said he was overwhelmingly convinced his students cheated on the final exam for one of his classes, with many using AI tools to do so.

“The results were anomalous,” he told Fortune, noting 8% of his class getting a perfect score on the multiple choice section of the exam while many either struggled on the essay portion or gave written responses with content Shelley hadn’t taught in class. “That just never happened in 20 years of teaching.”

Princeton University faculty voted last week to rescind its 133-year-old honor code and proctor all in-person exams to mitigate cheating using AI. Stanford University senior Theo Baker wrote in a New York Times op-ed this week that “cheating has become omnipresent” at his college.

But where some see a contradiction, experts see a peek into the minds of young graduates—the first generation of college students to experience their four-year undergraduate experience with tools like ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, at their fingertips.

Gen Z’s AI cognitive dissonance

Maitraye Das, a computer science professor at Northeastern University, studies Gen Z’s attitudes toward AI use, and a report she published last year found most college students use AI, but many don’t disclose it.

She identified the phenomenon as a form of cognitive dissonance, a psychological pattern in which a set of behaviors may contradict a belief system, leaving individuals to alter either their attitude or actions toward a certain topic.

In the case of her research, Das found students feared using AI would impede their critical thinking skills and learning goals. But at the same time, they felt they couldn’t afford not to use AI tools, feeling they would be left behind by peers continuing to use the technology.

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“The job market already seems precarious to them, and so even the students that did acknowledge that, ‘Oh, if I just use AI to do my homework, that will stunt my critical thinking,’ they still kept using it because the cost of not using it felt higher to them,” Das said.

Indeed, a stagnant job market, along with tech leaders warning of mass AI job displacement, has instilled fear in many recent grads. In March, Anthropic released a report revealing that AI could theoretically take over most tasks in business and finance, management, computer science, math, legal, and office administration roles, including 94% of tasks for computer and math workers.

Concerns around AI taking certain jobs have already begun to materialize as anecdotal evidence, despite no widespread proof of AI markedly changing the labor market. Tech layoffs have topped 110,000 in the first five months of this year alone, with companies like Snap announcing it would eliminate 16% of roles, about 1,000 employees, as it leans into AI.

While students see AI as a threat, Das said, the proliferation of AI in the workplace, as well as in schools—where last year about 30% of teachers said they use AI at least weekly—has also created a justification for them to use the technology, even if it means cheating or keeping quiet about their own AI use.

“They are thinking, ‘People rather than me are using AI. Why am I held to a different standard? Why can’t I use AI?’” Das said. “So instead of disclosing their AI use or limiting their AI use, they reframe the social context to make their behavior around secretly using AI to feel more acceptable to themselves.”

How society shaped Gen Z’s AI struggles

Widespread messaging about AI in commencement speeches—typically coming from AI stakeholders—have only grown the chip on Gen Z’s shoulder around AI use, according to Das. Skyrocketing tech stock valuations and the growth of the Magnificent 7 have created a K-shape of who stands to benefit from the technology’s growth.

“Students feel that there’s a corporate mouthpiece narrative,” Das said. “They are facing this very real fear of not landing a job, and so especially the tech CEOs, when they come to these commencement stages and encourage and cheerlead AI, I think students feel a disconnect there.”

Shelley, the health law professor, agreed that students cheating with AI is less of an endorsement of the technology and rather a survival tactic—perhaps even one they resent.

“AI is going to replace them, at least a lot of them, and they know that, and we’re pretending that it won’t,” he said. “I think they see through it. So students are responsible, but I don’t really blame them here.”

Some of the blame, Shelley argued, lies with educational institutions themselves, which have advocated for students to use AI. Two years ago, Arizona State University launched a collaboration with OpenAI to develop AI tools for higher education. But overall financial aid for colleges is lower now than it was 15 years ago, forcing some students to take part-time jobs. Now strapped for time, they feel like AI is the only way to accomplish their assignments, Shelley said.

Das noted that AI authorities, including higher education institutions, have done a poor job identifying what jobs will be created as a result of AI and subsequently encouraging the appropriate form of upskilling. The overall effect is students feeling disenfranchised from their future, resorting to shortcuts that may ultimately not prepare them with the tools or values to thrive as they take their next steps into the world, the experts warned.

“The worst thing we could do is blame students here,” Shelley said. “It’s our job to teach them, to nurture them, to inspire them, to guide them. It’s our job to educate them, and it’s our responsibility as society to take a deep look and go, ‘Why has this happened?’”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

At what point does a technological aid become a crutch—or even a handicap?

That question lies at the heart of several recent research efforts into the interactions between human minds and AI chatbots. So far, the findings of these experiments suggest that relying on AI to lighten our cognitive workload may potentially undercut our own capabilities.

In a study published in April, researchers in the U.S. and U.K. found that when people spent just 10 or so minutes using AI to help them solve math or reading-comprehension problems, their own unaided performance on the same types of problems diminished. The people who received help from AI not only fared worse than a second group who had worked without AI assistance, but they also gave up on challenging problems more quickly.

According to the authors of that study, their research provides “causative evidence” that relying on an AI for help reduces persistence and impairs unassisted performance. “People do not merely become worse at tasks, but they also stop trying,” they wrote. If these short-term effects persist with long-term use, then current AI systems “risk eroding the very human capabilities they are meant to support,” they added.

A related study, published last year and led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that people who used ChatGPT to help them write an essay “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels” compared to people who wrote the essay without AI. Within a few minutes of completing the task, the people who had worked with an LLM (large language model) struggled to remember what they’d just written. They also did worse than their study counterparts when asked to write an essay without AI’s help.

While these sorts of short-term thinking problems are worrying, some researchers say the greater concern is that, over time, people who rely too heavily on LLMs to do their thinking for them may gradually lose some of their ability to think deeply and critically for themselves.

“When you’re completing a task like writing an essay, even if you consider the task to be not important, you’re training yourself to sift and pick out important pieces of information, and to build an argument and develop a structured chain of thought—all of these important skills that improve with practice,” says Nataliya Kosmyna, a research scientist at MIT and one of the authors of the essay-writing study. “If you skip all that work by using an LLM, you’ve going to start losing those capabilities.”

‘Offloading’ may underlie AI’s cognitive effects

These findings come at a time when policymakers are considering the potential benefits and harms of AI adoption.

Even before the advent of powerful LLMs, widespread declines in math and reading scores among U.S. students—as well as similarly troubling trends among American adults—had raised concerns about the role modern information technologies are having on our ability to think and reason. As AI-powered tools have swiftly flooded U.S. classrooms and companies, these concerns have intensified.

Many of the possible pitfalls of AI overreliance revolve around a phenomenon neuroscientists call “cognitive offloading,” which refers to the use of external tools to support reasoning, remembering, and other mental processes.

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“There is some evidence, at least among adults, that excessive cognitive offloading can lead to a short-term decline in corresponding abilities,” says Kristy Armitage, a research fellow at the University of Queensland in Australia.

While that evidence is far from conclusive, especially when it comes to the latest AI tools, Armitage says caution is warranted. “It feels as if we're entering a qualitatively different era with AI that seems more concerning than other digital thinking tools,” she says. “[AI] fosters the sense that it can replace the need for independent thinking, and there are clear indications that people are using it in this way—to bypass the need to develop new skill sets, write assignments or reports, make complex decisions, and so on.”

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Some of Armitage’s work has examined cognitive offloading among kids. “This is mainly speculation, but I think it's reasonable to be concerned about children,” she said. “If excessive offloading is interfering with unaided cognitive abilities, then these negative consequences may be far worse for children, as many of these abilities are still developing.”

Not all researchers are so concerned.

“I’m skeptical we’re harming our abilities with artificial intelligence,” says Sam Gilbert, a senior research fellow at University College London. “While there definitely is evidence that when people use cognitive tools they disengage their own cognitive processes, there’s also evidence that we re-engage these processes elsewhere.” For example, someone who relies on AI to compose an email or look up a piece of information may then devote that time and brainpower to some other, more meaningful task. “So it may be more of a rebalancing than a net loss."

Gilbert says that some mental abilities function like muscles in the sense that if we don’t exercise them, they weaken. “If you always offload one particular skill to AI, you’re likely to become deskilled with regards to that specific task,” he explains. “But even if that's happening, I think we may be gaining new skills at the same time, like learning to critically evaluate the output from tools like ChatGPT.”

He points out that many older forms of technology-supported cognitive offloading—such as relying on a calculator to do math work—also had people worried. But at least in the case of the calculator, research eventually revealed that the technology could actually augment learning and skill development—provided it was introduced in the right ways. “With calculators, we learned that you need an independent phase where you learn first without them,” he says. “There’s an argument that you need to build foundational skills before bringing in technology, and I think that might be similar with AI.”

Understanding how best to use these technologies

While some researchers are considering the effects of artificial intelligence in hypothetical terms, others say the way people are already using AI in real-world settings paints a different and more alarming picture.

In his new book The Convenience Trap, the SBS Swiss Business School professor Michael Gerlich describes how many of the university students he teaches, as well as the business professionals he trains, now turn to AI chatbots for “anything and everything.”

“It’s a different form of offloading than we’ve had before,” says Gerlich, who has also published research on our use of AI. Unlike older online search engines, which would lead users to pages of potentially relevant but also imprecise information—information that users would often have to parse and collate themselves to formulate a useful answer—the latest AIs do all the work for us. “This makes generative AI quite different from other forms of information technology,” he says. “It can lead to what I call the AI-trust spiral, where the more I use AI, the more I trust it, the more work I offload to it, and the less critical I become of what it tells me over time.”

Like other researchers who have published work on AI, Gerlich says the costs and benefits of these tools likely depend on how people use them.

“If you’re including AI at the end of your own thinking process—asking it what you’ve left out, or to give you opposing opinions—that could elevate your own thinking,” he says. But in his experience, this isn’t how most people use these technologies. “People say, ‘Well, I’ll ask the AI first, and then start thinking for myself when I get the results,’ but we know it’s very hard to really think outside the box once you have this well-reasoned, nice sounding answer from an AI.”

Kosmyna, the MIT scientist, echoed many of his sentiments. “Before we all start using LLMs for everything—especially in educational contexts—we need to take more time to understand the best ways to use them,” she says.

The stakes couldn’t be higher.

“By introducing these tools, you’re toying with the brains of people, and really with the future,” she says. “You are messing with some of the most precious things we have, and to do that without understanding the effects is very dangerous.”

This piece was copublished with The 19th, a nonprofit newsroom covering gender, politics, policy and power. 

On Nov. 5, 2024, men and women around the U.S. headed to the polls to decide a race hyped as a battle of the sexes.

By evening’s end, Kamala Harris’ quest to punch through the “highest, hardest glass ceiling” and become America’s first female president lay in shambles. Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s undisputed alpha male since 2015, would return to the White House. And voters, especially the youngest ones, were themselves divided starkly on lines of gender.

As in each of the three previous federal elections, women’s support for the Democratic ticket considerably exceeded men’s. But the gulf separating Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 was historically wide: According to an analysis by Catalist, a data and analytics company that contracts with progressive organizations, Harris won the backing of 63% of women and just 46% of men.

The 17-point gap cleaving through Generation Z was not only bigger than that of every other age group; it was comfortably the largest Catalist had measured across four presidential cycles. Surveys of Trump’s approval conducted by NBC News corroborated the same trend the following year, showing disparities between the men and women of Gen Z that eclipsed smaller splits among Millennials, Gen Xers, and Baby Boomers.

Jennifer Benz, a political scientist who leads the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, said findings like that were consistent across surveys she administered prior to the Trump-Harris contest, as well as exit polling conducted at the end of the campaign. Men and women have generally favored different political parties for roughly a half-century, but it was unusual for newly minted voters to lead the way, she added.

“What’s been notable about this younger generation is that the gender divide is already shaping up now, as opposed to when they age into the more typical partisan patterns we’ve seen over recent years,” Benz said.

While Gen Z’s gender gap is a relatively new phenomenon, its features can already be seen in K–12 schools. They spring from the rancorous gender politics of the 2020s, which have left girls repelled by Trump’s policies and boys disaffected by Democrats’ seeming indifference to their concerns.

As the youngest “Zoomers” enter high school this year, they appear to be accelerating toward the political — and often social — estrangement already evident among their older brothers and sisters. Their stories, based on interviews with The 74 and supported by the insights of educators and public opinion researchers, offer a rare snapshot of that polarization as it takes shape. In America’s college dorms and high school homerooms, young adults are seeing the world differently, occupying separate online spaces and even demonstrating an aversion to dating.

Sarah Campbell, a high school teacher in Brunswick, Maine, said she’d noticed a pronounced change in her social studies classroom. Earlier in her career, students broadly approached discussions of politics and public policy with open minds. But over the past 10 years, a growing number have entered those conversations “already aligned with certain ideas.”

“I’ve had girls talk about things like safety, rights or future opportunities in very real, personal ways, and in the same conversation, boys are questioning whether those issues are still relevant,” Campbell wrote in an email. “They’re not just disagreeing, they’re experiencing these issues from completely different realities.”

‘Feminism rooted in me’

Those distinct worldviews may have origins stretching long before adolescence. Celeste Lay, a professor at Tulane University who studies how young people acquire political beliefs, noted that their beginnings overlap with children’s early attempts to fashion adult identities for themselves.

“At the same time young people are going through political socialization, they’re also going through gender socialization,” she said. “So as they’re developing their politics, they’re learning what it means to be a boy or a girl and what society says those concepts mean.”

In a 2022 paper, Lay and several co-authors used survey data from more than 1,500 children to determine when they start to examine the world through the lens of partisanship. They discovered that kids as young as six are already tottering down the path to the ballot box, and nearly half the study’s participants affiliated with a party by the age of 12.

A high school senior named Lily was once such a novice partisan. Raised in South Lyon, Michigan, along the outskirts of Metro Detroit, she was encouraged by liberal-minded parents to take an interest in U.S. history and current events. When she was eight, the Democrats nominated the first woman to lead a major party’s presidential ticket. After that, her course was set.

“This sense of feminism rooted in me because my parents were letting me educate myself,” Lily recalled. “When Hillary Clinton was up against Trump, I was like, ‘There’s never been a female president! I have to support her.’”

A decade after that formative electoral heartbreak, she spoke to The 74 while taking part in the National Student Leadership Council, a for-profit summer program offering learning experiences in a range of fields. Alongside a few dozen others with similarly arcane interests in bicameralism and campaign finance, Lily — whose last name has been withheld to allow her and her peers to speak freely about political matters — spent nine days last July at the Georgetown University campus. In between sessions role-playing as U.S. congressmen, the group made field trips to walk the halls of the Capitol in person.

Lily and her fellow government enthusiasts might reasonably be called some of the most civically engaged high schoolers in the nation. But countless girls her age followed a similar trajectory to both political consciousness and the political left.

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In the years spanning the Clinton and Biden administrations, the youngest female voters steadily warmed to the label of “liberal” (historically the least-popular ideological category). By 2023, Gallup research shows, the proportion of women aged 18–29 who described themselves as liberal had leapt from 28% to 40%, while liberal men of the same age stalled at 25% over the same period.

The evolution was not merely rhetorical. Teenage and 20-something women adopted more progressive stances on the environment, abortion, gun rights, marijuana access, the Israel-Palestine conflict and an array of other cultural issues. Today, the women of Gen Z are commonly regarded as the single most liberal voter demographic.

Marie Sarnacki, an English and history instructor in South Lyon, contrasted recent waves of female students with those in her own graduating class of 2009. While stipulating that she spoke only for herself, Sarnacki added that girls in 2026 had far fewer reservations about voicing feminist beliefs on some of the most pressing questions of the day.

“I don’t know if they would give themselves the label, but it’s safe to say they’re more open about their concern for reproductive rights or supporting classmates who are gay,” she said.

The elephant in the room

Sarnacki believes that the ideological shift she has witnessed throughout 11 years in the classroom can be substantially explained by a corresponding development unfolding on the Right.

Trump’s presidencies, each achieved through the defeat of historic female candidacies, have repeatedly pushed debates around sexism and women’s rights to the center of the national agenda, she argued. From the Women’s March to the #MeToo-inflected Kavanaugh hearings, the stunning demise of Roe v. Wade, and the president’s demeaning comments about various female antagonists, the Trump era may have hastened a leftward drift that was already in progress.

Daniel Cox, director of the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI)’s Survey Center on American Life, agreed with Sarnacki. While women have lately gained ground against or even pulled ahead of men in some professional and educational spheres, he continued, many of the most “momentous cultural events” of the last 10 years led them to the conclusion that their rights were imperiled.

“They were doing really well in higher education and high schools in terms of AP courses and graduation rates, and tons of statistics suggest that young women were comparatively doing better than men,” Cox said. “But when they looked around politics and the culture, they were upset about a lot of things and became politically active.”

Public opinion research provides clear signs that their dissatisfaction remains high during the second Trump presidency — and is equally vivid among those too young to participate in elections. An AP-NORC survey from last summer revealed that, within a representative panel of children aged 13–17, girls were vastly more negative than boys in their assessments of Trump (-38 from females versus -7 favorability from male respondents) and the GOP (-16 from girls and +2 from boys), while also much warmer toward the Democratic Party (+13 from girls and -5 from boys).

Trump’s macho stylings and media omnipresence play a crucial role in expanding the rift. Lily remarked that he has become an inescapable figure, whether in school or on social media. If anything, the president’s ubiquity was actually heightened by his reelection defeat in 2020, which lengthened his time in the spotlight.

“He’s so loud, with all the scandalous things he’s done,” she said. “You can avoid the news, but you can’t avoid him.”

Another participant in the NSLC’s Georgetown session was Cate, a junior enrolled at a small private school in Louisville, Kentucky. Like Lily, she said she was motivated by societal injustice to become involved in politics. Her father is gay, and his experiences were part of what spurred her to activism.

But whether engaged in private discussions with friends or public outreach through her school’s Human Rights Club, Cate felt frustrated by her male classmates’ lack of interest in the politics of Kentucky or the wider world.

She expressed particular disappointment with boys in her school who, she suspected, held views similar to hers but would not voice them out of fear of losing face with friends who “idolize” Trump’s brash manner. The gush of short-form entertainment glorifying the president on platforms like TikTok helped foster a hero worship that was difficult to puncture.

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It was understandable that young men would seek to emulate a powerful personality, Cate said, specifically citing the 2024 assassination attempt against Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The moment after that attack, when the then-candidate rose to his feet and exhorted his audience to “fight,” has become a centerpiece of video edits aimed at teenage boys, she said. Yet his influence heightened a dynamic in which “empathy is seen by this generation of men as weak, feminine.”

“It gets into all this misogyny,” she lamented. “But women, who don’t care about that and can be empathetic loudly, are more able to share their political opinions.”

‘Where am I in this equation?’

Girls were not alone in observing the stridency of gender conflict. Nor were self-described progressives the only ones to complain about its occasionally personal nature.

Nathan, a junior from the prosperous suburban enclave of Westfield, New Jersey, struck a note of bemusement when describing an oft-abused target of the online right: left-leaning white women, a category encompassing many of the students he’d met that week at Georgetown.

“There’s a stereotype that liberal white women are self-hating,” he said. “And supposedly it’s not feminine, and it’s not attractive, and it’s not manly if you support it.”

Voluble and direct, Nathan described himself as a “right-winger,” one of the few participating in the program. But he professed no admiration for political harangues mingled with sexism, and he objected to the treatment suffered by some of his gay classmates at home, who he said were frequently mocked in private.

Instead, along with several other male students, he spent much of an hour-long conversation with The 74 lampooning the fixation of social authorities — including his school’s leaders — with identity politics. A multitude of perceived sins drew their attention, including the proliferation of various “heritage months” across the school calendar and the alleged maligning of the Founding Fathers in history curricula. The most annoying of these were dismissed as “virtue signalling.”

Many politically engaged young men share Nathan’s perspective on the newfound prominence of equity-focused language and policies.

This is, in fact, a key distinction between male and female Zoomers. According to an AP-NORC poll released in 2022, Gen Z men and their Millennial counterparts were only about half as likely as women to “closely follow” news coverage of social issues. And while the rising salience of such causes, including LGBT rights and abortion, have clearly played a role in politically activating many American women, they do not appear to have galvanized men to support Democratic candidates.

Catalist’s overview of the election results shows that both men and women became more likely to vote Republican between 2020 and 2024, but the gender gap across all ages was principally driven by men abandoning the Democratic Party.

Monty, a junior from deep-blue San Diego, said that students attending his private high school were “extremely left,” and typically surrounded by friends and family members of the same mindset. A strong impulse to activism also pervaded the halls, he added, attracting a number of his peers to Pride marches and No Kings rallies over the past year.

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As Monty described it, the somewhat airless ideology of his school mirrored that of the larger progressive movement: Just as he’d periodically felt isolated during a long stretch of school assemblies commemorating the historic contributions of women and minority groups, a groundswell of “stranded people” were successfully targeted by the Trump campaign with identity-focused appeals.

“You have all these other groups represented, and then you have a generation of these young white males saying, ‘Okay, where am I in this equation? Because I’m not Black, I’m not a woman, I’m not LGBTQ, and I don’t know where I’m going to fit into this,’” Monty said.

Rachel Janfaza is an independent researcher who writes the newsletter The Up and Up, which aims to surface the attitudes of Gen Z for a national audience by convening focus groups and listening sessions around the United States. In an interview, she said Democrats had “fumbled” in 2024 with a critical group of potential male supporters.

“You have all these other groups represented, and then you have a generation of these young white males saying, ‘Okay, where am I in this equation? Because I’m not Black, I’m not a woman, I’m not LGBTQ, and I don’t know where I’m going to fit into this.'”

Monty, student, San Diego

“I don’t think the Republican Party necessarily set out to attract young men from the start, but the Democratic Party being so coded as being friendly to women made it hard for young men to see themselves in that party,” Janfaza said. “A lot of the men I spoke to who voted for Trump in 2024 felt like they were still not being messaged to by the Democratic Party.”

‘This system doesn’t benefit us’

Part of the difficulty in communicating to Gen Z is the fact that, beneath the level of partisan affiliation, perceptions of society and gender often differ significantly.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the respective views of men and women toward feminism, a cause that has continually gained public support since the 1960s. Women have always been more keen than men to accept the label of “feminist,” but a 2023 poll from AEI showed that over half of male Millennials said the term fit them personally; that figure was actually higher than the proportion of women from preceding generations who agreed with the description.

Yet far fewer of the youngest male respondents agreed. Zoomer men were only as likely as those in Gen X — a group more than twice their age — to call themselves feminists. Between that striking reversion and the leap in self-described feminism among younger women, Gen Z saw the widest gender gap on the issue of any age cohort.

In the same survey, 23% of Gen Z men said they had experienced gender-based discrimination, a nearly fourfold increase over the oldest men included in the sample. Women are also increasingly likely to express this belief, with half of all Gen Z females saying they’d been discriminated against (compared with just 38% of Boomer women).

Some fear that such sharp departures on fundamental questions will foment mutual resentment. Nathan, the New Jersey high schooler, said that boys his age were becoming embittered by a lack of recognition from the political left. In particular, he said that white males could be alienated from the Democratic Party in the same way that African Americans tossed aside their Republican allegiances in the 20th century.

“I think a similar situation is happening with young white men,” Nathan said. “They’re like, ‘This system, this establishment, doesn’t benefit us in any way. We have no stake in maintaining it.'”

Meanwhile, dramatic developments in the political realm can leave residue in the social one. The interpersonal relations of men and women are under greater strain than at any time in the past few decades, epitomized by a plummeting number of teenagers exploring romantic relationships. While almost 90% of high school seniors reported that they’d gone out on at least one date in 1987, according to a recent poll by the Institute for Family Studies, only about half said the same in 2024.

Competing partisanship seems to be at least partially responsible for the decline. In a poll conducted last year by NPR and PBS News, 60% of Zoomers agreed that it was “important to date or marry someone who shared your political views”; by contrast, 62% of respondents aged 60 or older said that politics didn’t carry much weight in matters of the heart. A broader report published last year on the American dating scene found that fully three-quarters of single women with a college degree said they would think twice before dating a Trump supporter.

Campbell, the Maine social studies teacher, said she had seen both sides of the dichotomy in her high school class. Girls are increasingly hesitant to pair off, or even socialize, with male classmates. Boys jokingly attack one another as “simps” — a slang term for men desperate for the attention of women — and have become “much more likely to push back” in class discussions of gender differences.

“The same way we find ourselves in social situations where we’re pressured to join some clique, that’s present in our political positions too. . . and guys experience that too. I just think they’re better at hiding it.”

Lily, student, Pennsylvania

“There is almost a defensiveness in their attitude, as if I am trying to tell them they aren’t important and girls are,” Campbell wrote. “It is genuinely a shift that is concerning to me.”

Lily, who now attends high school in State College, Pennsylvania, didn’t address her dating life. But she opined that the apparently right-wing outlook expressed by some boys may simply reflect their wish to fit in — an instinct with which she sympathized.

“The same way we find ourselves in social situations where we’re pressured to join some clique, that’s present in our political positions too,” she said. “And guys experience that too. I just think they’re better at hiding it.”

What comes next?

Neither students, teachers, nor researchers could guess whether the gender gap would reverse with time or continue to grow.

In his sixth year in office, young women haven’t relented in their loathing for Donald Trump. In fact, it might be said that American women and the Democratic Party have become increasingly synonymous, both measurably more feminist, more liberal, and more credentialed than they were a generation ago. According to Gallup data, one out of every three Democrats is now a college-educated woman.

On the other hand, it is far from clear whether a sufficiently large number of today’s high school boys will reverse course and embrace the Democratic candidate in 2028. A recently released edition of the semi-annual Yale Youth Poll showed that 68% of voters aged 18–22 disapprove of Trump’s performance in office, a four-point increase since the previous fall; still, men in that age range actually became less favorable toward the Democrats during that same five-month span.

If national Republicans hope that disenchantment brings them an army of converts, they may find themselves disappointed. AEI’s Cox said the evidence from most polling and election results shows only that young men have become hostile toward Democrats — not that they have become doctrinaire conservatives.

“I’m not even sure they like the Republicans that much, honestly,” Cox said. “It’s not so much that they’re attracted to the whole GOP agenda — it’s that, between the two parties, they’re looking at which one seems more receptive to the concerns they have.”

Asher, visiting NLSC’s summer program from Pennsylvania’s solid-blue Delaware County, said he would have voted for the Democratic ticket in 2024 had he been old enough. The measured junior particularly came to admire Tim Walz after he was selected as Harris’s vice-presidential pick.

Yet he critiqued the way in which the party sought to woo men as “pandering,” including an affinity group launched to rally “White Dudes for Harris,” and Walz’s misused football lingo. (The Minnesota governor later disclosed that he saw his ability to “code talk to white guys” as one of his major contributions to the campaign.)

Nathan recalled an episode that saw Walz join Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a gaming session streamed on the popular service Twitch. “They had the most artificial attempts to win over men,” he marveled. “Tim Walz and AOC playing video games, and you could tell they weren’t actually playing. No one related to that!”

Asher — happy to number himself among the relatively scarce white dudes for Harris, albeit one without a vote — said he hadn’t personally felt excluded from political debates with left-leaning classmates, but acknowledged that such conversations sometimes hinged on participants’ personal “credibility” to speak on specific issues.

“I have seen that happen with people: ‘You don’t have female genitals, so you don’t get to have an opinion about abortion,’” he said.

The Up and Up’s Janfaza said that similar complaints are a hallmark of her listening sessions with college undergraduates. Many feel as though their sentiments, goals and desires are so diffuse that they are “talking past each other.”

“When I ask young men and women, ‘Do you see a gender divide in your community?’ they are so quick to tell me that they feel men and women are on different playing fields,” she said. “This isn’t fun for anyone.”