DEBATE: Why Do Gen Z Women Hate Men So Much? - #1094

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Did you read this new statesman article?

**Dr. Tania Reynolds** (0:02)
I did.

**Chris Williamson** (0:03)
Okay. What did you think of that?

**Dr. Tania Reynolds** (0:05)
I thought it was fascinating. I thought it was concerning, but also a little bit predictable that women are, well, there was a lot in there. There was, you know, women have a bleak outlook on life, and that they are also spending a lot of time online, which is making everything worse, and that they dislike men so strongly, more than men dislike women.
I think that this is to be predicted by an evolutionary framework. Throughout human history, women were very vulnerable because they are targets of sexual abuse, because they're reproductively valuable, they're smaller on average, and they needed assistance getting the calories for themselves and for their children, and the data suggest women's foraging isn't enough to sustain even themselves. So, women who signaled their vulnerability through looking kind of pitiable would have been favored, but also any display beyond that. So, communicating sadness, communicating need would have been favored. So, I think this kind of tendency towards a bleak outlook on life makes sense, and in fact, women perceive themselves around the globe to be less happy, less healthy than men, both mentally and physically. And so, this is a common pattern. And there also seems to be like a social contagion effect to it. So, if you look at women's interactions, when they are sad, their partners, whoever they're interacting with becomes more sad. Their depression spreads through networks in a way that men's doesn't. So, there's also like a social contagion effect. So, I think a lot of this makes sense. And then, if you look at like the men hating, it also makes sense that if women needed to signal their loyalty to one another, so if they were often in these patrilocal environments where they weren't around their family or kin, then one way to communicate to other women, you can trust me, is by being loyal, a really good friend, but also probably being a girl's girl.
And one way to signal you're a girl's girl is by hating men. Hannah Bradshaw has some cool research showing that women who are guys' girls tend to be not trusted by other women. So if you have more guy friends, they don't trust you, they think you're more provocative. And so I think some of this is also related to that. I think there's a lot going on.

**Chris Williamson** (2:42)
Is that in-group loyalty thing around the guys' girl stuff?

**Dr. Tania Reynolds** (2:46)
I think so. So she didn't test it in that framework. She tested it as like just, what do you think of a girl who only has guy friends or a girl who has girl's friends? And women like the girl with girl friends more and trust her more.
But in some of our data where we looked at kind of this asymmetry and concern for men versus women, women showed the bias to a stronger degree than men did. So I think if you put those two together, I think women might be like advocating for women to signal to one another, I'm on your team.

**William Costello** (3:19)
Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Tania. And to add a few more evolutionary perspectives to that, I was listening to the podcast from the journalists who did the research and I was just banging my head against the wall thinking, there's so much evolutionary psychology at play here, you can't see it.
There's also an error management perspective. So everything in evolution is a trade-off between costs and benefits. And for most of our evolutionary history, women were making the trade-off that they were benefiting by selecting men who would be able to provision them with resources and be able to protect them. Those are no longer as salient as benefits to modern women who are earning their own money, achieving their own status and living in a pretty safe world, even if they don't always feel it's all that safe. So those are no longer really key benefits that men can provide. So they're looking for men to provide other benefits that they're just not stepping up to the plate to do. So if you think about it from an error management perspective, the costs of selecting a bad mate still are exactly the same as the words throughout ancestral history for women, but the benefits just so that basically the juice is not worth the squeeze for modern women. So like I read the article and our lab focuses on sexual conflict. And one of the solutions to sexual conflict that we always promote is to try and encourage cross-sex mind reading. For the last number of years, I've tried to get people to see it from the men's side that, oh, well imagine how it would feel to suddenly be asked to provide value in ways that you don't really know how, that you're being outpaced in status and you can no longer add value in those domains.