The headline caught my eye: “Our own ‘war on woke’ is well under way”. The piece on Newsroom by Associate Professor Rebecca Stringer, of the University of Otago, opens with the results of the Aotearoa New Zealand Gender Attitudes Survey 2025, released in August.
The survey analysis, based on a representative sample of more than 1000 New Zealanders, has a number of top-line results: more than three-quarters (79%) believe gender equality is a fundamental right and six in 10 agree sexism is still a significant issue. These figures are pretty much unchanged over the years the survey has been conducted.
It looks like we’re broadly in agreement then? Not so fast, bucko, because in what may feel like a “holding two opposing ideas at once” scenario almost half the respondents also think gender equality has for the most part been achieved.
This is about 50% higher than in the first survey in 2017. One in five say gender equality has gone too far, a question that was not asked in the surveys before 2023.
Unsurprisingly, there’s variance between male and female respondents’ views. Though there isn’t a strong gender difference as to whether gender equality is a basic right, men have robustly different responses to the other questions. By an 11-point margin they’re more likely to say equality has been achieved or gone too far, and less likely to say sexism is still an issue.
Age plays a fascinating role because it interacts with gender. Men, specifically those aged 18-34, have the least positive attitudes, and women aged 65 and older are less likely than their younger female peers to perceive sexism.
Though younger men stand out, the most concerning datapoint for me is their response to the question on gender equality being a fundamental right. Pretty much 78% or more of every gender and age group agree with this except 18- to 34-year-old men, where it drops to two-thirds (67%). That’s 18 percentage points fewer than the 85% of men aged over 65 who report the strongest endorsement.
Eight years ago, about the time of the first Gender Equality Survey – and the year Jacinda Ardern won her first term as prime minister – my friend Chris Sibley told me about a longitudinal study his colleagues were about to publish about sexism in New Zealand. The paper, whose lead author was Matt Hammond, teased apart how sexism changes over time (a cohort effect) and by age (a developmental effect) over a five-year period.
As men get older they generally start endorsing more “benevolent” sexist attitudes – of the “women are precious flowers who need protection from the vicissitudes of the world” kind. But fascinatingly, the participants were individually becoming less patronisingly sexist. In contrast, men’s “hostile” sexism – of the “women are manipulative schemers using their sexual wiles to control men” sort – dropped slightly as men hit their mid-40s before plateauing a bit. But again, male participants showed notable drops in their individual levels of hostile sexism.
This stands against the background of US politics and the return to the White House of Donald Trump, thanks in large part to increased turnout and a swing in his favour from young men. The post-election autopsy seems to suggest as more liberal – and even centrist – voices have taken up the cause of sexual, gender and other minorities, young men have increasingly felt marginalised and ignored. In the US and many other places in the world, it’s younger men who are most likely to say they feel lonely most of the time.
In 2017, Sibley said I’d be happy as the father of girls at what his results showed. Yes, I said then, but now I’m worried what the most recent results show.
