From the minute they set foot on campus, college students are thrown into a political cauldron. Diversity, equity, and inclusion offices, which “believe the university should be used to re-engineer American society away from color-blind meritocracy and toward equality of outcomes,” consequentially fracture student communities on the basis of politics, gender, and race. These offices also regularly push politically dubious narratives upon students, making students believe that they are oppressed and victims of the current culture.
This campus political climate, when added on top of the usual stresses of managing course loads, a social life away from home, and the omnipresent social media world, can make life difficult and stressful for students. Is it any wonder college students are in the midst of a mental health crisis?
This is especially true for young women. Research has broadly shown that women report worse rates of mental health compared to their male counterparts. This gender gap has become even more apparent among Gen Zers.
Recent data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, for example, show that young women deal with appreciably higher levels of stress and anxiety than their male counterparts. When college students were asked about how often they feel stressed, frustrated, or overwhelmed, more than three-quarters (77%) of all students reported feeling these feelings more than half of the time. A closer look found that 84% of women, compared to 66% of men, reported regularly feeling stressed and overwhelmed. This 18-percentage-point difference points to something larger going on with collegiate women.
The gender gap continues across a host of additional mental health questions. While more than two-thirds of students (68%) reported feeling anxious more than half of the time, 77% of women, compared to 56% of men, reported feeling anxious this frequently. About 51% of female students said they feel lonely regularly, compared to 43% of male students. And 45% of female students feel depressed regularly, compared to one-third (33%) of male students.
While all of these levels of worry and stress are too high for both men and women, why is there such a large gender gap? Writers such as Jonathan Haidt argue that the contagion effects of social media are creating a “tidal wave” of anxiety, depression, and self-harm, mostly affecting young girls.
Certainly, social media and digital connection play a role in affecting college students’ mental health. However, there’s another, though largely overlooked, cause driving the significant mental health gender gap on campus: politics and ideology.
In the past decade, Gen Z collegiate men have become more conservative, while Gen Z collegiate women have become more liberal. Young women are also more likely to vote, care about political issues, and participate in social movements and protests than young men. Presently, almost 55% of female students identify as liberal, while only 13% identify as moderate and 15% as conservative. Almost 40% of men, however, identify as liberal, 16% as moderate, and 25% as conservative.
Women on campus are now overwhelming left of center compared to men, and they are certainly being targeted and influenced by DEI offices, which are “far-reaching on most campuses” with the intention of turning tomorrow’s leaders “into advocates for a far-left version of social justice.” DEI offices have long seen women as victims and engage with liberal women quite differently from the more centrist men. These differences are now playing a major role in shaping campus culture.
Numerous studies have shown that those on the Left have embraced the logic of oppression and harm. Those on the Left also tend to be more politically radical, insular, vocal, and politically active than their moderate or conservative counterparts. And, unsurprisingly, almost all of the reactionary chaos on campus (from protests and sit-ins to the extreme and harsh rhetoric toward certain groups and the allegations of harm and threats of violence) is coming from the Left.
From Vanderbilt to Harvard, we regularly now see women leading political actions on campus as part of a larger trend of female political activism and mobility. Their world, thanks to their liberal ideology and DEI offices, is one where they see unending harm and narratives of victimization.
If women are embedded in communities where everything around them and their own ideology states that they are constantly confronting dangers such as harm, violence, and oppression and where they are led to believe that identity politics is how we should engage with difference, it should surprise no one that there is a significant mental health gender gap.
This is all more proof of why DEI must be dismantled and destroyed — for it poses a real danger to both the civic sphere and the health of so many women.
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Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
