2.3 Discussion Overall, gender gaps among young men and women are thus most consistent in left-right ideological self­placement and gender equality attitudes, but less so in voting for different party families. Regarding cross-country differences, Sweden reveals the most consistent youth gender gaps across all investigated indicators, with young men and women distinguishing themselves most strongly from older men and women, whereas Germany does not reveal any such patterns. For Greece, Poland and Spain, we find some less consistent evidence of youth gender gaps – usually with men taking more conservative attitudes than women – that are often more pronounced among the youngest age group. The youth gender gap in left-right ideology seems to be mostly explained by young women increasingly identifying as left-wing, while young men today do not identify as particularly more right-wing than young men in the past decades. Regarding youth gender gaps in gender-equality attitudes, we more often see a trend where young men hold more conservative attitudes than older men today, while young women more often do not differ from older women in their attitudes. Thus, depending on the variable of analysis, youth gender gaps may be explained by young women’s progressivism(relative to older women) or young men’s conservatism (relative to older men). Importantly, this quantitative survey analysis does not tell us why young men and women are drifting apart on some variables, and not on others, and why this differs between countries. To dig deeper into understanding the reasons behind these trends, the next chapter investigates how young men and women in Greece, Germany, Poland, Spain and Sweden talk about politics and gender equality in their own words. EqualiZe 49