King's College London

It has emerged that when casting their votes in July this year, men were more likely to vote for Reform and women more likely to vote for the Green Party.

And the gap was particularly stark among the youngest voters – those aged 18-24, with 19.7 per cent of women voting Green compared to 13.1 per cent of men. At the opposite end of the scale, 12.9 per cent of young men voted for Reform UK compared to just 5.9 per cent of women.

The findings were revealed in a new article published in Political Quarterly co-authored by Rosie Campell (King’s College London), Ceri Fowler (St Hilda's College, Oxford), Anna Sanders (University of York), and Rosalind Shorrocks (University of Manchester).

Professor Rosie Campbell, Professor of Politics at King’s College London, said: “We have seen differences between men and women at the ballot box in recent elections and it is interesting to see how in the latest election, it was at the opposite ends of the political spectrum that this gender gap was strongest.

Data for the article was drawn from the British Election Study for the 2017, 2019, and 2024 elections. As well as a divergence in vote choice, it also showed a clear difference in the issues ranked most important by men and women.

According to the data, 40.7 per cent of women aged 18-34 ranked living costs as their most important election issue compared to 29 per cent of men, and women were more likely than men to highlight living costs as a top issue across all age groups.

Men, by contrast, were much more likely to rank immigration as an important election issue across all age groups but particularly men aged 18-34 (12 per cent) compared to women of the same age (4.9 per cent).

The analysis is not the first time to not a gender gap among voters. The 2017 and 2019 elections marked a turning point in the UK as the first elections post the Second World War in which a greater proportion of women voted Labour and a greater proportion of men voted Conservative, thus creating a ‘modern gender gap’.

In 2024, the analysis shows that pattern changed, as slightly more women voted Conservative than men, and the gap was strongest at opposite ends of the political spectrum around supporters of the Green Party and Reform UK.

The article authors said: “The modern gender gap in two-party support evident in 2017 and 2019 did not resurface in 2024. In fact, women were slightly more likely than men to vote for the Conservative Party. However, this trend should not be interpreted as a reversion of the gender gap to pre-2017 trends.

“Younger women remain to the left of younger men in their party choice, but the difference is most evident at the extremes of the political spectrum, with younger women giving greater support to the Greens and younger men lending more of their votes to Reform.”