The Toxic Gender Gap Destroying Campus Debate

Somewhere along the way, women forgot the Bible’s call to prudence, to open our mouths with wisdom and let kindness sit on our tongues.

Instead, we daughters of the West now open our mouths to screech at our enemies and, apparently, our allies.

Wow. FIRE data shows male students are more tolerant of ideological enemies than female students are of ideological allies. Read that again and then click the link.

https://t.co/5ZCo7N2dHd

— Casey Mattox (@CaseyMattox_) October 26, 2026

According to hilariously obvious yet still jarring data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, men are often more tolerant of their political opposition than women are of their own side.

When students were asked whether their school should allow a speaker on campus who had previously expressed a controversial idea — regardless of the student’s own views — women proved far less tolerant of every speaker, right-wing and left-wing alike. In fact, men are so much more tolerant that the gender gap simply swallowed the ideological one. Liberal men and women were slightly less tolerant overall, but the pattern was clear: men are less censorious and more willing to let the other side speak than women.

Lol. We already knew this. But it’s still fun to see it charted.

Anyone in my life can tell you I’m a highly disagreeable 24-year-old. I’m ashamed to say it, and I’m actively working on my sass and argumentativeness, but it’s the truth. And I’m quite conservative. 

None of this means women are bad. We simply have higher empathy, higher threat sensitivity, and a preference for social harmony over open confrontation. Which may sound at odds with my earlier confession: online, we screech; in person, we smile. We’re a confusing sex. 

We keep small circles of cohesion and tolerate little deviation. Step out of line or offend one of us, and we’ll nurse a grudge into the next decade. Our newfound enemy may never know it, or at the very least we won’t express our hostility to her face. Instead, we serve passive-aggressive kindness, then complain to our families, friends, and boyfriends.

The sisters nod along, adopting a shiny new disdain for your fresh enemy, who is now their foe, too. The boyfriend offers advice: “Why don’t you just tell her how you feel?”

To which you answer, “No. I could never do that. I’ll just pretend everything is fine.”

It’s not fine.

When you apply this phenomenon at scale to modern universities, it makes perfect sense that women would suppress dissent and favor emotional comfort over truth-seeking. Men hash things out. They’re open to debate. Women rehash the same argument over and over in our heads, which we call beating a dead horse and which, for some of us, is a sinfully sweet pastime. More often than we admit, we would rather feel right than hear the other side.

This extends to tolerance of thought. A 2019 Knight Foundation survey of 4,407 college students found that nearly six in 10 women said promoting an inclusive society mattered more than protecting free speech, compared with 28% of men. Ewa Golebiowska’s “Gender Gap in Political Tolerance,” published in Political Behavior in 1999, found women more reluctant than men to extend constitutional rights to disliked groups. And according to studies by Jonathan Haidt, college women with higher agreeableness were predicted to have lower political tolerance. And of course we’ve known throughout evolution that women have a lower risk for social tolerance, a stronger preference for harmony, which is exactly why we’d rather shut our dissidents up completely, even those we nominally agree with.

It’s like every quarreling girl duo in the movies. Smile and laugh to keep the shaky peace. Turn around and bemoan. Beat the dead horse.

But beating a dead horse with people who will only affirm our delusions is useless. The horse is already dead. He cannot hear you milking your monomania. Instead, we should, and I know this is a wild idea, openly confront ideas. It’s the only way to correct errors, and institutions that systematically prefer emotional comfort will produce worse ideas.

I’m reminded of a video I saw this morning, of a black woman debating Charlie Kirk. She was appalled that he would even ask her why it is that black folk are committing more crimes, are more impoverished, and fare worse on a range of outcomes than they did in the 1940s, after trillions of dollars spent on welfare, reform, and other interventions. The camera panned to a white woman whose jaw hit the floor at the mere mention of the question, and Kirk was labeled a racist for asking. He had violated their hallucinatory harmony, their comfortable chimera.

They would rather let the problem persist and pretend it isn’t there at all, fix nothing, and preserve their feelings.

This is a reality I’m willing to accept about my sex. Leftist women? Not so much. They pride themselves on being beacons of empathy, hope, and understanding. The latest presidential candidate they dug from the ashes of the Biden administration literally went by “Mommala.” They claim life would be better if women ruled all, that the patriarchy must fall, and that if we could just have more love for each other and abolish the border wall, America would finally be a better place.

And if by “better” we meant hostile, unforgiving, and full of dead horses and fake smiles, then sure.

They don’t see the hypocrisy there.

I love my fellow women. I think we’re magical creatures. But it would do us all a favor to be more upfront, honest, and open with each other. Let’s choose prudence over grudges, and wisdom over condemnation.

And if we can’t manage that, let’s at least have the decency to admit it.

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