There’s a claim growing rapidly in popularity that organizations in the US have become much more social justice-oriented/woke over the decades because of the increasing fraction of women in them.
Note that this is not a claim about organizations becoming generically progressive or liberal, or about women being progressive-leaning. It’s a much more specific claim: that institutions in the US became much more social justice-oriented/woke in (a specific belief system held by some progressives) and that the cause of this was a growing number of women entering the workforce. However, this claim (if it were true) would imply, among other things, that women are far more social justice-oriented/woke than men in the US. So, are women more woke than men?
As we’ll see, the difference between women and men in how social justice-oriented/woke they are is actually pretty modest in the US! Because of that, the data below provides pretty strong (though not perfect) evidence against the claim being made. If women are that much more woke than men, then it’s hard to explain organizations becoming more social justice-oriented on the basis of a rising fraction of women. Note: I weakened my claims in this post a bit as I updated the calculations with more polls.
Let’s go through the numbers.
YouGov 2024: only 18% of men and 19% of women identify as woke.
And here are the results from our site http://PersonalityMap.io, which provides access to >1 million human correlations.
Note that a correlation of 0.10 is extremely small (the average magnitude of correlation between totally random pairs of statements is about 0.10), and these are all for the US:
Correlation between being a woman and…
• “I identify as a social justice advocate or as woke”: r=0.05
• “I am in favor of giving women preference in hiring and promotion because of past discrimination.” r=0.12
• “Due to past discrimination, blacks should be given preference in hiring and promotion over other groups.” r=0.07
• “There are only two genders.” r=-0.08
• “In terms of your political views, to what extent are you conservative rather than liberal?” r=-0.08
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Some people shared more links to polling results (in the comments). Here’s what those look like (once I converted them to correlations with being a woman):
Gallup 2023 US poll (treating identification with conservative as +1, moderate as 0, liberal as 1)
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Correlations of being a woman with conservatism:
Among 18-29 year olds: r=-0.15
Among 30-49 year olds: r=-0.09
Among 50-64 year olds: r=-0.13
Among 65+ year olds: r=-0.12
NBC / SurveyMonkey US Poll 2025 (treating agree as 1 and disagree as 0):
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Correlations of being a woman with agreeing “there are only two genders”:
Among 18-29 year olds: r=-0.18
Among 30-44 year olds: r=-0.08
Among 45-64 year olds: r=-0.12
Among 65+ year olds: r=-0.05
And here’s the strongest one, but it’s still a relatively modest correlation.
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Correlations of being a woman with agreeing with “DEI programs being helpful”:
Among 18-29 year olds: r=0.25
Among 30-44 year olds: r=0.17
Among 45-64 year olds: r=0.19
Among 65+ year olds: r=0.12
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These correlations mean that women are only modestly (before I wrote *negligibly* but I think that’s too small now, having updated with these latest numbers from these other polls) more social justice-oriented/woke than men – not nearly enough, in my opinion, for women’s growing role in the work force to explain changing institutional norms.
The group where correlations are highest is 18-29 year olds, who make up only approximately 20ish percent of the US workforce. For older cohorts (which make up most of the women in the workforce), the correlations are weaker.
Sources:
YouGov (you have to click through to the survey): https://today.yougov.com/…/50975-few-americans…
https://news.gallup.com/…/women-become-liberal-men…
https://www.nbcnews.com/…/young-men-women-are-taking…
This piece was first written on October 30, 2025, and first appeared on my website on November 10, 2025.
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