When Women Are Radicalised

Men aren’t the only ones susceptible to extremist thinking.

Saturday Protest For Palestine 22 May 2021 in London. Yousef Salhamoud on Unsplash.

This was originally published in The Dispatch on 27 June 2025.

Banging drums in Columbia University’s Butler Library in early May, a group of protesters shouted: “Free, free Palestine!” When campus security shut the doors of the reading room, effectively trapping the demonstrators in, their chants turned into pleas. One person tried to break through to the exit, and a scuffle broke out. “You’re hurting him, stop!” a girl cried out. By the end of the occupation, eighty protesters had been arrested. Sixty-one of them were women.

The Columbia protest made national news in the US, but the striking gender imbalance of its participants went largely unnoticed. It shouldn’t have. Whether the cause is Gaza, climate change, Black Lives Matter, or feminism, overrepresentation of young women has become the norm in progressive activism. And this shift signals a susceptibility to ideological extremism.

Women moving to the left is a global phenomenon. A 2020 study on the Extinction Rebellion environmental movement in the UK (a group which regularly engages in civil disobedience such as blocking traffic and vandalism) described it as a “highly feminised” protest culture. Surveys have found that attendance at climate demonstrations in cities around the world tends to be about sixty percent female, and recent American progressive movements—such as Black Lives Matter and the Gaza encampments, many of which were supported or led by the female-founded Jewish Voice for Peace—have likewise been launched and sustained by women.

Data published by John Burn-Murdoch in the Financial Times confirms that the shift spans continents. In South Korea, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, Gen Z women have shifted toward “hyper-progressive” political positions, while men in the same age cohort have held steady or moved to the right. In the US, according to Gallup data, women aged 18–30 are now thirty percentage points “more liberal” than their male peers.