Gender Gap

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Overall Summary

Throughout the last decades, a gap in ideological self-placement has appeared. The so-called “gender gap” highlights the differences of opinion between men and women. In their article The gender gap in ideology, Barbara Norrander and Clyde Wilcox precisely show how this gap has evolved and widened. More specifically, they distinguish various general issues, linked to ideological identities, which are conditioned by gender. The two authors state that women are usually depicted as more liberal, and men as more conservative. However, this statement is later revealed to be a generalization. Religiosity, social and professional integration, and economic position have increasingly shaped the North Americans’ ideological differences between genders. As a matter of fact, according to the article, the gender gap is only valid when scanned in parallel to all the other political behavior variables.

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Background

Research on gender gaps in the North-American electorate was not really taken into account when surveys of voting behavior first appeared. The hypothesis that men and women vote differently first appeared in the 1970s. It became an established research field and a main interest of scholars in the 1980s and the 1990s, in particular with intellectuals like Klein (1984), Cook and Wilcox (1991) or Norrander (1999). Other researchers, such as Chaney, Alvarez and Nagler (1998), Kanthak and Norrander (2004) and Gilens (1998) have analyzed the gender gaps in the American electorate. Fine, Genest and Wilcox (1990), as well as Smith (1986) and Shapiro (2002), led further investigations on issue preferences between men and women. Kaufmann and Petrocik also wrote a few papers on partisanship and gender in 1999 and 2002. According to the researches, before the 1970s, the average gap was not really significant. It has, however, substantially increased...