The concept of the gender gap relies on the assumption that men and women have differing political interests, and that these interests can be discerned through their choices at the ballot box. In the earliest eras of American democracy, women’s opportunities for political influence were severely limited. Denied the right to vote or even to own property, women were forced to depend on their fathers or their husbands to represent their political interests. In some localities during this time period, widows were permitted to vote in local school elections; however, there was little pressure to expand the franchise prior to the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, where founders of the fledgling women’s rights movement first gathered to express their support for both the abolition of slavery and the expansion of the franchise to women, the poor, and to African Americans.
In 1869 the Wyoming Territory guaranteed women full suffrage, which remained law when Wyoming became a state in 1890. In 1893 the state of Colorado followed suit, joined three years later by Utah and Idaho. From 1910, beginning with Oregon, through 1918, eleven more states, most of them west of the Mississippi (with the exception of Michigan and New York) guaranteed full suffrage for women, bringing the total to fifteen states, with several more allowing limited suffrage (e.g., allowing participation in primary elections—which at that time were not nearly as significant as they are today—and participation in specified municipal elections). By 1919, only seven states denied suffrage altogether, and ten more restricted suffrage to the most local matters (e.g., school bond and taxation proposals). Most, but by no means all, of these states were in the South. In 1920, the United States Constitution was amended—the Nineteenth Amendment—guaranteeing all women the right to vote at all levels: federal, state, and local. In the decades that followed, women’s voting patterns did not differ substantially from those of men. That is to say, women voted according to their social class, their religion, their geography, and even their ethnicity. It was not until the emergence of the women’s rights movement that men and women first saw their political interests diverge. By the late 1970s, the Republican Party and the Democratic Party offered very different positions on the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, equal pay, and abortion rights. And gender differences in vote choice began to emerge.
By the Campaign of 1988, pollsters and political scientists found evidence of a growing gender gap between Republican Party and Democratic Party supporters. Specifically, Democratic candidates at all levels received a higher percentage of votes from women than did Republican candidates. Republican candidates, on the other hand, received a higher percentage of white male voters. Moreover, there also appeared to be a marriage gap among women voters: exit polls indicated that Democratic candidates performed very well with unmarried, college-educated women, whereas the Republican Party fared better with middle-class, married women.
The gender gap has become a major feature of the political landscape of the United States, appearing in all subsequent presidential elections (with the arguable exception of the Campaign of 2008, in which Democratic nominee Barack Obama fared well with both men and women). In their study of the gender gap in the Campaign of 2012, Maxwell, Ford-Dowe, Jimeno, and Shields found that much of the gender gap occurred outside of the South, where 60 percent of women supported Obama, compared to only 45 percent of men. In the South, they found very little evidence of a gender gap: 49.6 percent of Southern women voted for Obama, as did 48.3 percent of Southern men. This pattern is evident among white voters as well as Latino voters (but not African American voters, who overwhelmingly supported Obama regardless of gender or geography). 53.8 percent of white women residing outside of the South supported Obama, but 52 percent of white men outside of the South supported Romney. However, among Southern whites, 66.6 percent of women supported Romney, as did 65 percent of men. Similar to the rise in support for Romney among white women in the South, the researchers found that Latino women in the South tended to support Romney at higher rates than Latino women outside of the South. Their data show that 73 percent of non-Southern Latino women voted for Obama, whereas his support dropped in the South to only 55 percent of Latino women. This research suggests that the gender gap is influenced by race, ethnicity, and geography.
Preliminary research by Maxwell et al. found that although Hillary Clinton was preferred by three out of five voters, women were twice as likely to express support for her than were men. Men expressed a preference for Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, or Chris Christie over Clinton when offered the option, suggesting the continuation of the gender gap in the Campaign of 2016. While most voters preferred a candidate of their own party to any alternative, Republican women were more likely than GOP men to express a preference for Clinton over the three GOP candidates offered, suggesting that women voters in the GOP may be dissatisfied with their party’s large field of almost exclusively male candidates (Carly Fiorina being the only exception) and the lack of progress on the cultivation of a more diverse group of potential nominees.
While political candidates often refer to health care, education, and reproductive rights as “women’s issues,” these issues are not the underlying source of the gender gap. Rather, public opinion data continue to show that women and men differ most on issues related to the death penalty, gun rights, and military involvement in other nations. Specifically, women are less likely than men to support the death penalty, more likely to favor gun control, and less likely to favor the use of force abroad.
See also Campaign of 1992; Campaign of 1996; Campaign of 2000; Campaign of 2004; Women’s Equality Issue
Carroll, Susan J., and Richard Logan Fox. Gender and Elections: Shaping the Future of American Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Maxwell, Angie, Pearl Ford-Dowe, Rafael Jimeno, and Todd Shields. “Is There a War on Women? Attitudes about Women in the Workplace.” Report from the 2012 Blair Center-Clinton School Poll (2012), Diane D. Blair Center of Southern Politics and Society, University of Arkansas. http://blaircenterclintonschoolpoll.uark.edu/6759.php. Accessed September 5, 2015.