Gen Z, Gender, and COVID-19

Abstract

Using a national survey of Generation Z conducted in late May 2020, we measure attitudes about the impact of the coronavirus on personal health, financial and job concerns, views about shelter-in-place laws, and 2020 voting intentions. Gen Z women express greater health and economic concerns and support for shelter-in-place measures than their male counterparts, but this gender gap is largely mitigated by party and other covariates. Party also mediates the differences between young male and female voters concerning the influence of the coronavirus on their vote choice in 2020. Notably, women have significantly greater concern about the impact of COVID-19 on their personal financial situation, while Gen Z men express more concern about their personal health amid COVID-19 in more fully specified statistical models. This research contributes to the growing literature that examines not only the sorting effect of party on the gender gap but also how different identities—in this case, generation—can help explain the persistent political divides between men and women.

Culture, Aging, Self-Continuity, and Life Satisfaction

“…Further, factors such as climate change, global wars and conflict, record-breaking levels of debt, increased competition due to globalization, and the expected large-scale losses of jobs due to automation have added further angst in the minds of young adults (Berman et al, 1994;Nau et al, 2015;Reyes et al, 2021). Undoubtedly, the short-and long-term negative consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic will only exacerbate these issues (Deckman et al, 2020), although the present study was conducted before the pandemic. Finally, though every generation experiences its share of stressful events, the rise of social media, which has made repeated exposure to distressing events much more likely than any other time in history, has further intensified these issues (Twenge, 2019).…”

Does threat from COVID-19 stimulate attitudes amenable to public cooperation? Evidence from India

“…Nevertheless, several recent studies find responses to COVID-19 to vary over social and political characteristics (e.g. Allcott et al, 2020;Deckman et al, 2020;Gadarian et al, 2021Grossman et al, 2020Hsiehchen et al, 2020). Furthermore, exploring the conditioning impact of background characteristics on treatment effects can help shed light on whether the largely insignificant findings manifest because different groups react in contradictory ways to the pandemic.…”

The crowding of social distancing: How social context and interpersonal connections affect individual responses to the coronavirus*

“…The control variables performed as one might expect given prior work on the pandemic and rhetoric surrounding social distancing policies (Deckman et al 2020;Kämpfen et al 2020; Pickup, Stecula, and van der Linden 2020). Beginning with partisanship, Democrats were more likely to support social distancing in both Studies 1 and 2 but did not significantly differ from other partisans in terms of pandemic concerns or beliefs about the end of social distancing restrictions.…”