Dodgy attidudes

Young men have less awakened views of gender rights than their fathers.

- BY MARC WILSON

The headline caught my eye: "Our own 'war on woke' is well under way". The piece on Newsroom by Associate Professor Rebecca Stringer, of the University of Otago, opens with the results of the Aotearoa New Zealand Gender Attitudes Survey 2025, released in August.

The survey analysis, based on a representative sample of more than 1000 New Zealanders, has a number of top-line results: more than three-quarters (79%) believe gender equality is a fundamental right and six in 10 agree sexism is still a significant issue. These figures are pretty much unchanged over the years the survey has been conducted.

It looks like we're broadly in agreement then? Not so fast, bucko, because in what may feel like a “holding two opposing ideas at once” scenario almost half the respondents also think gender equality has for the most part been achieved.

This is about 50% higher than in the first survey in 2017. One in five say gender equality has gone too far, a question that was not asked in the surveys before 2023.