The Gender Gap in Voting

(Bloomberg) -- In every U.S. presidential election since 1964, more women than men have turned out to vote. And since 1980, the two genders have differed markedly in their preferences at the ballot box, with women tending to choose candidates from the Democratic Party more than men do. Though this gender gap in voting is not just in the U.S. — women around the world have become more likely to vote for candidates on the left, particularly in western Europe and Canada — it’s become a defining feature of American politics and more pronounced under President Donald Trump. Why have women and men diverged, and what does it mean for elections to come?

The Situation

In his surprise 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, the first woman nominated for president by either of the two major parties, Trump won 52% of votes cast by men but only 41% of those cast by women. That gender gap of 11 percentage points tied the biggest recorded in the four decades it’s been tracked in U.S. presidential elections. Trump entered office with an approval rating of 50% among men and 38% among women — another substantial gap, and one that has remained in the double digits during his presidency. A large gender gap drove the outcome of the 2018 U.S. midterm election, when Democrats captured control of the House of Representatives. Polls show female voters are a major obstacle to Trump’s bid for a second term in the Nov. 3 election. A Pew Research Center poll of registered voters in the weeks leading up to the presidential nominating conventions in August showed Democrat Joe Biden, the former vice president, leading Trump by 2 percentage points among men and 14 percentage points among women. An ABC News/Washington Post poll of registered voters taken right before the conventions began put Biden’s lead among women at 16 percentage points. 

The Background

The gender gap in voting is relatively new. Research shows women in the U.S. generally voted the same as men until the 1960s, when more joined the workforce and put off marriage. The first documented gender gap was in the 1980 U.S. presidential election, when the Republican Party, under nominee Ronald Reagan, moved fully to the anti-abortion stance it has today. While men backed Reagan by a wide margin, the female vote was more evenly divided between him and Democratic President Jimmy Carter. That created a gender gap of 8 percentage points. Four years later, when Reagan trounced Democrat Walter Mondale to win a second term with the support of a clear majority of women, the gender gap nevertheless persisted: The percentage of women who supported Reagan, 56%, was six points less than the percentage among men. In the elections since then, the gap has ranged from 4 to 11 percentage points, according to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. 

The Argument

Political researchers are trying to figure out why women vote differently than men. Women voters were more left-wing than men in the 1990s in countries such as Japan, Ireland, Denmark, Austria and the Netherlands, but more right-wing in Turkey, Chile and Spain. That’s according to a 2000 report that concluded that “the shift towards the left among women is strongly influenced by the modernization process.” More recent analysis ties the U.S. gap to perceptions of women’s economic security and the ideological polarization of U.S. politics, which has split the two parties on touchstone issues — such as homosexuality, caring for the poor and deploying military force — on which men and women have long diverged. Since more women than men tend to vote, the U.S. gender gap would seem to favor Democrats, but that hasn’t necessarily been the case: In the 10 elections of the gender-gap era, starting with 1980, the Republican candidate won six times. One big reason: As women have gravitated toward the Democrats, men have moved in bigger numbers to the Republican Party. And the 2016 election results showed that gender is not the only gap at work. While Clinton scored wide margins of victory among black and Hispanic women, Trump won by 2 percentage points among white women, a much larger group.

The Reference Shelf

• The Pew Research Center’s examination of the 2016 election.
• A February 2020 article in The Atlantic explored why men vote for Republicans and women for Democrats.
• An International Political Science Review paper on political gender gaps worldwide.
• The Center for American Women and Politics has a collection of papers on the gender gap.
• The World Economic Forum tracks other gender gaps — in health, education and the workplace — in annual reports.
• A Chatham House paper on “Europe’s Political Tribes,” published in December 2017, surveyed 10,000 Europeans on attitudes towards the European Union, identifying gender differences.

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