HSSH Brown Bag Seminar: Do Young Men and Women Really Differ More Than Before?

Recent media discussions have suggested that young men and women are drifting apart in their worldviews. In this presentation, Ville-Juhani Ilmarinen presents a paper that examined whether such claims hold up using European Social Survey data from 2002 to 2023, covering 34 countries. He asks whether gender gaps in values are larger in more gender-equal countries and whether they have widened over time, especially among younger people (aged 18-29).

The short answer is: not really. Across countries and over time, the evidence does not support the idea that men’s and women’s values are increasingly diverging. If anything, the overall gender difference was slightly smaller in 2023 than in 2002, although the overall time trends for men and women were both weak as well as heterogeneous across countries. Analyses focusing on younger respondents and single countries also did not show the kind of widening youth gender gap often implied in public debate.

Beyond the empirical findings, the presentation reflects on how knowledge about social trends is produced in an era where publicly available survey data are easy to analyze and visualize. Data journalism can raise important questions, but it often operates with largely uncontrolled analytical degrees of freedom and strong incentives to report striking patterns rather than null results. Social science faces similar temptations, but also has tools such as preregistration, transparent reporting, and clearer distinctions between exploratory and confirmatory research. This case illustrates why those tools matter: sometimes the most important finding is that the headline story is not happening.

Ville-Juhani Ilmarinen is a university researcher at the Department of Education, University of Helsinki. His research and teaching focuses on statistical methods and metascience. His work has explored topics such as how personal values relate to parenthood and voting, psychological similarity between close individuals, political polarization, personality, political ideology and health behavior, and gender differences from a cross-cultural perspective.

The seminars are open to everybody. We expect a multidisciplinary and methodologically curious audience from different faculties and units of the central campus. The most important prerequisite for participation is not methodological expertise, but an open mind towards new methodological innovations and discussion across methodological and disciplinary boundaries.

You’ll find more information and the zoom link visit : https://www.helsinki.fi/en/helsinki-institute-social-sciences-and-humanities/events/brown-bag-seminar