In 2026, will the great gender divide widen or begin to close? This trend has been particularly noticeable among Gen Z, with women’s political views shifting further to the left, while men’s views become more conservative. It is visible in religion, too, with more young men demonstrating interest in traditional forms of religious practice than young women for perhaps the first time in history.
As King’s College London research shows, the divide is even greater when it comes to statements such as “feminism has done more harm than good”.
One in six young men agrees that feminism has done more harm than good, compared with one in 11 young women. Young men are more adamant about this than men aged 60-plus.
This gender divide has led to predictable consequences in areas such as dating and long-term relationships. As a Financial Times headline put it last year, the relationship recession is going global. Rising rates of single people are being observed in the US, Finland, South Korea, Turkey, Tunisia and Thailand.
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Given the current trends, there is something brave about the title of Leah Libresco Sargeant’s latest book – The Dignity of Dependence: A Feminist Manifesto. She was advised to write about interdependence instead, because dependence is synonymous with weakness and neediness.
But she refused – she chose to focus on dependence, because she argues it is an inescapable and foundational aspect of being human, and the denial of that fact is particularly damaging to women.
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US society has a particular difficulty with needing help, often seeing it as embarrassing or even disgusting, implying that those who rely on others are less than a full, free adult human being.
Yet there is not a single human being whose existence does not owe itself to a woman. Despite this foundational fact, the first sentence of her book declares “The world is not shaped for women.”
This leads to potentially lethal consequences, such as women involved in car crashes being 17 per cent more likely to die and 73 per cent more likely to be injured than men in the same crash. That’s because – as Caroline Criado Perez identified – crash test dummies are modelled on men, ignoring the differences in women’s height, weight and pelvic structure.
The same holds for medication. A 2020 study found that women experienced adverse drug reactions twice as often as men, partly because standard doses may overmedicate women’s smaller bodies, and because women’s bodies metabolise drugs differently.
Libresco Sargeant argues that women’s childbearing capacity is particularly problematic for society because it fundamentally contradicts the prevailing ideal of autonomy. It exposes the reality of deep human dependence – a concept the culture despises and attempts to suppress because it violates the idea that men and women are fully interchangeable.
Women carry out a disproportionate amount of care, which is simultaneously expected of them and used to discriminate against them because care work is not seen as something vital, not even to the economy.
The book notes that “if unpaid care work were tallied up at the market rate, Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin estimates it would make up ‘a full 20 per cent of GNP’ ”. This illustrates the vast scale of care work that is generally invisible in economic metrics. Care is not an “individualised hobby” but a “key load-bearing part of civilisation”.
However, Libresco Sargeant is wary of just measuring everything by how much it costs. Putting an economic value on care work helps measure opportunity costs, that is, what a caregiver gives up by stepping back from paid work. However, it offers a “bad portrait of value” because it equates care with the salary that the caregiver forgoes.
Care work cannot be reduced to its monetary value. Its intrinsic messiness and intimacy defy the logic of the market.
Libresco Sargeant uses the concept of “liquid modernity”, borrowed from Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, to describe the expectation that all bonds are loose and easily dissolved, and change is both constantly anticipated and valuable. Women and their stubborn bonds with their children interrupt this expectation. But it does not serve men well, either. Libresco Sargeant describes the “lie of autonomy” as being a little easier for men, but ultimately, it leaves them devoid of meaning.
In the face of a culture that does not make room for women, some have advocated a return to a kind of 1950s tradwifery, where the husband is treated like an honoured guest in the home and the woman undertakes all the labour of care.
Libresco Sergeant rejects this as a model. Instead, men need to be intimately involved in the work of caring, especially in the persistent, unglamorous, vital work of caring for children and the elderly. Some will find the book too idealistic. The value of dependence may be overstated. There are unhealthy forms of dependence as well as of independence. But as a manifesto, it offers a clear way of bridging the gender divide that is leaving so many outwardly independent people lonely and isolated.
