A longer version of this essay was originally published by the Eternally Radical Idea.
Suppose you’re a democratic socialist who has been invited to speak at a college campus. Who do you think would be more likely to try to silence you, a left-leaning woman or a right-wing man?
It may be reasonable to assume someone with a similar ideology would be more tolerant of your views, but new data by FIRE suggests that’s not the case. Amazingly, it turns out men are often more tolerant of the opposite side than women are of their own side.
The data, taken from FIRE’s annual College Free Speech Rankings, reveals that overall tolerance for opposing views is low among both male and female students — but the males consistently display far more tolerance than females, regardless of their politics. In fact, with the exception of male libertarians, who are slightly more tolerant, men of all political ideologies have roughly the same level of tolerance as each other. The same is true of women.
In other words, it’s not that liberals are more tolerant than conservatives, or vice versa. Liberal and conservative men are more or less equally tolerant, as are liberal and conservative women. It’s being a man, liberal or conservative, that makes the difference.
While political affiliation makes people more biased towards speakers who share their views, it affects their overall willingness to let speakers speak, regardless of ideology, very little. But regardless of party or ideology, men are so much more tolerant than women that the gender tolerance gap dominates the ideology difference. In fact, men are over 3.5 times more likely than women to be “perfectly tolerant” of opposing views, meaning they would definitely allow any campus speaker.
So why does such a large gender tolerance gap exist? FIRE’s data doesn’t give us a confident answer, but these findings are consistent with decades of literature investigating political tolerance or support for censorship, which show that men are, on average, more tolerant and less censorial than women.
No matter how well-intentioned, we must never ban speakers or silence students.
But the data does rule out a few possibilities. You might wonder, for instance, whether women are more censorial due to being more personally affected by the positions of the hypothetical speakers our surveys asked about. But only one of the speakers argues for a position that disproportionately affects women (banning abortion), and the gender gap isn’t greater for this speaker, so that doesn’t seem to be what’s causing the gap. My suspicion, corroborated by other research, is that women prefer social harmony.
No matter how well-intentioned, we must never ban speakers or silence students. The consequences of allowing censorial people to control the discourse on campus have proved calamitous. Anyone seeking to stifle debate for the sake of emotional comfort must be publicly reminded that our most vital tools for righting the wrongs of society depend upon being able to openly confront controversial opinions.