It’s official: the kids are not alright. Frankly, who can blame them? The modern world is in a perpetual state of economic and ecological crisis. Tech bros have infiltrated the White House. AI is eradicating entire industries. People’s sex lives are dictated by algorithms. And, as illustrated in the latest Netflix hit, Adolescence, there’s the growing threat of the manosphere, a once niche corner of the internet dominated by violent and misogynistic ideologies, whose anti-women theories have gone mainstream.

To be clear, I’m talking about Gen Z, the generation that is coming of age in a society defined by disruption, fear, and instability. Born between 1997 and 2012, Gen Z is the cohort that’s currently between the ages of 13 and 28. For jaded millennials such as myself, they used to represent a more positive future: back in the mid-2010s they were a group of people on whom we could pin our hopes, dreams, and projected fantasies for years to come. They were apparently progressive. They felt emboldened, educated. And they might have possessed enough information at their fingertips to tackle the wave of right-wing nationalism that’s been building both in the UK and overseas. That was the hope, anyway. But our optimism is quickly being eroded.

At least it is if you’ve been reading any of the recent research that’s been published on Gen Z in recent months, which has led to a number of surprising revelations about what this cohort really thinks about everything from feminism and marriage to gender equality and consent.

Earlier this month, a 30-country study published by Ipsos UK and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London found that Gen Z men and women are more divided than any other generation when it comes to their views on gender. The research, which was based on a survey of nearly 24,000 people across 30 nations, found that 53 per cent of Gen Z women call themselves a feminist, compared to just 32 per cent of Gen Z men, marking the largest gender split among generations surveyed.

Meanwhile, over a quarter (28 per cent) of Gen Z men said a man who stays home to look after his children is less of a man, which was nine points higher than the share of Gen Z women (19 per cent) who said the same. On top of this, a staggering 60 per cent of Gen Z men said that men are being expected to do too much to support equality while 57 per cent said we have gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are now discriminating against men.

These figures might seem out of place in 2025, but in actual fact, they follow on from a series of similar stats that point to regressive societal attitudes among Gen Z. Last year, research commissioned by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) found that almost half of those aged 18 to 24 are likely to hold false beliefs about rape and consent. Only 53 per cent of those surveyed correctly identified that an attack is still rape if the victim doesn’t resist or fight back and just 42 per cent recognised that being in a relationship or marriage doesn’t mean consent to sex can be assumed.

All of this is surprising, even to those conducting the research. “Generally, in most social attitude surveys we see a pattern of younger generations being more progressive than older generations,” says Professor Heejung Chung, director of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London. “We do not see this is the case for many Gen Zs across different countries – South Korea being an exemplary case. Other countries… we don’t have enough data points, but in certain cases, we can see that Gen Z are even less progressive than older generations.”

Part of the reason could be down to conservative messaging peddled on social media, which is something that, unlike preceding generations, Gen Z is growing up alongside. “There has been a narrative that has been promoted by politicians, social media influencers, and partly by media around the ‘threats’ of feminism, gender equality and rise of women’s power,” says Chung, who believes young men might be mirroring these debates and wrongly projecting their own insecurities onto them. “I think some of them unfortunately may see the causes of their grievances, like a lack of good jobs and opportunities to get on the housing ladder, as something that has happened due to the societal support of women.” This could be particularly true for Gen Z who have yet to experience gender inequality in the labour market or the division of labour in a domestic household. “To them, it may feel more like women are doing better yet society is still talking more about supporting them and not men,” Chung adds.

According to one study from February 2024, social media algorithms have been found to amplify misogynistic content to teenagers. Conducted by UCL, the University of Kent and the Association of School and College Leaders, the study found that accounts that viewed material exploring themes of loneliness or self-improvement were increasingly fed videos focused on anger and blame directed at women. Researchers identified a fourfold increase in the level of misogynistic content on the “For You” page of TikTok accounts over just five days on the platform. This ranged from objectification and sexual harassment to discrediting women.

“Social media algorithms play a huge role here in pushing sensationalist and ‘edgy’ content,” says Deo, senior policy officer at advocacy group, Hope Not Hate. “This is the case for all generations but with Gen Z there is a real confidence that they have digital literacy, which they do in terms of knowing how to operate technology, but they often lack in terms of identifying disinformation, reading comprehension and sources.”

A lot of the young people Deo speaks to are confident in their online skills but, when pushed, reveal they get all their news from social media and assume that if something has a lot of likes, it’s more likely to be true. “The Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial is a prime example of this,” she says. “There are also interesting questions around the erosion of respect towards real-life influences. If parents and teachers – especially if they are women – aren’t being respected by Gen Z young men but online influencers or friends are, there’s a difficulty in coming back from where we currently are.”

Of course, men are feeling the divide themselves, particularly if they’re on the more liberal side of the fence. “The divisions often appear in the way people talk about work, relationships, and even personal goals,” says Chad Teixeira, 28, who has noticed a split among his own friendship group, especially when it comes to identifying as a feminist. “Some of them would definitely call themselves feminists but others might shy away from the term due to misunderstandings about what it actually stands for.”

It’s something much younger Gen Z women have noticed, too. “Calling yourself a ‘feminist’ has become less common among my friends,” says Megan Tandon, 17, a Hounslow Youth Council member and young consultant at Participation People, an organisation that empowers businesses to centre youth voices, and shape decision-making. “Since feminism in the last two generations started becoming more popular, adopting more anti-feminist views is the new counterculture, which makes it an attractive opinion to have,” Tandon posits.

A lot of this is down to younger people holding more reactionary attitudes, something that is more common among young men in particular. “Either Gen Z are acting as adolescents and rebelling in a more ‘devil’s advocate’ way that they will grow out of, or there is something specific about this generation’s experiences that are shaping their views which will last longitudinally,” says Deo. “But there’s also an interesting question to ask about why we assume that all young people are progressive and ‘woke’ and what contributes to that impression of them.”

It’s not just the views of young men that are defying expectations. An increasing number of reports have pointed to how misogyny is thriving among young women, who are actively revolting against liberalism and instead are buying into archaic ideas around marriage and femininity. On one side, you have the trad wives, ie women who portray themselves as domestic goddesses whose lives revolve around serving their male partners. At best, their content is inane aspirational nonsense. At worst, it advocates for a version of womanhood that is devoid of agency and financial independence. On the other end, though, you have more extreme “anti-woke” influencers like Hannah Pearl Davis, 28, who once argued that divorce should be illegal and women shouldn’t have the right to vote. Then there’s Brett Cooper, 23, who described “pro-life laws” as the government’s way of “requiring that you take personal responsibility for your actions”.

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It’s hard to know exactly where this is coming from. “The era of girlboss feminism has collapsed, and in its place, a hyper-feminine, even traditionalist aesthetic is resurging in the form of ‘soft life’ and ‘stay-at-home girlfriend’ trends,” says psychologist Ieva Kubiliute. In many ways, conforming to such ideals, instead of consistently pushing up against hurdles faced by those who are more progressive, is seen as the easier option for some. “I believe many young women in this generation are openly embracing older gender norms, not necessarily out of oppression but as a rejection of burnout culture and unrealistic expectations of modern womanhood.”

Of course, there’s a key distinction between young people holding more traditional and, in some cases, right-wing views and those leaning towards extremism. However, it’s not hard to see how one could slip into the other, particularly if they’re feeling somewhat isolated and are being fed the right content online – Hope Not Hate has observed a rise in the number of young people being referred to the government’s Prevent programme, which tackles extremism, as well as an uptick of reports of sexual violence in schools.

“The main issue for me is how to avoid men’s and women’s rights being pitted against each other,” says Deo, who views polarisation as being at the root of all of this. Every critique is an attack from one side to another; nuance is void. “Even gender equality as a term is seen by many as favouring women in some way,” she adds. “We need proactive and positive work with men and boys that is intrinsically for them rather than being about preventing them from being ‘evil monsters’. So many young men are sensitive to the idea that they are being seen as potential criminals. We also need young men to understand that we care about dismantling the patriarchy for everyone’s sake. That feels like it’s missing right now.”

Perhaps what we’re also missing is a reality check. Because while stereotypically young people are more progressive than older generations, clearly that’s not the world we live in. At least not anymore. Pretending otherwise will only set us back further, least of all because that’s part of the reason we’re here. For too long, the economic and social problems faced by millennials like me were sidelined — and sometimes satirised — to the point that it all simply got kicked down to Gen Z without so much as an avocado toast meme for respite. Not enough of us noticed when people started seeking solace online, let alone what they were engaging with. This brings me back to Adolescence, in which a 13-year-old boy is accused of murder and later found to have been deeply embedded within the manosphere. “Maybe I took my eye off the ball a little bit,” says Stephen Graham in the role of the boy’s father, Eddie Miller. “But he was in his room, weren’t he? We thought he was safe, didn’t we?”