To the extent this is true, I would phrase it the other way: women are becoming less conservative, while young men are drifting towards the extreme right.
Just because everyone around you (which is academia) thinks this, doesn't mean its true. Because the data says the complete opposite: men drift towards the center/right, women to the extreme left.
Data by "German General Social Survey", Infratest/Dimap (an established and respected polling institute):
I have plenty of right-wing economist colleagues, thanks. And these data are for Germany, while we’re commenting on a thread about the UK.
I suspect this is also a hard thing to ‘prove’ with data, since it’s importantly about a shift in how people label left/centre/right. (No left-wing parties I know of are currently suggesting returning income tax rates on the rich anywhere near to historically normal levels, for example).
It's hard to know what to make of this without a better understanding of the methodology. But the supposed leftward shift of men and women in the UK is kind of hard to square with an increasing vote share for the hard-right morons of Reform UK.
> I have plenty of right-wing economist colleagues, thanks.
Can you name one?
> I suspect this is also a hard thing to ‘prove’ with data, since it’s importantly about a shift in how people label left/centre/right.
This is rather easy to prove with data: which type of concrete policies are they in support of (as opposed to some label, or party name or whatever, which might change its "content" over time). As a matter of fact, this being done and the trends hold.
To the extent this is true, I would phrase it the other way: women are becoming less conservative, while young men are drifting towards the extreme right.