If Women (or Men) Didn’t Have the Vote

Posted on February 12, 2007 by Dave Pollard

Something strange happened around 1980 in the US and Canada, and perhaps in other countries as well. Women of all ages, who had previously been more conservative than their male cohorts, crossed over and became more liberal, both socially and economically, on almost every issue.

Prior to that, if women hadn’t had the vote, we might have had more liberal regimes (e.g. a majority of men voted for JFK; a majority of women for his opponent, Richard Nixon). But men generally get their way, and for the most part women’s votes haven’t made a difference to the final outcome.

Since 1980 the men=conservative, women=liberal gender gap has steadily widened. What’s really interesting to imagine is what the world would probably have been, and would be like today if men didn’t have the vote:

President Gore would be in his second term.
There would have been no Iraq war.
There would have been no huge tax cuts for the rich at the expense of social programs.
The US would not be reeling under a crushing federal debt.
The Liberal Party would still be in power in Canada.
Canada and the US would both have ratified, and be working furiously to comply with, the Kyoto accord.
There would be no NAFTA.

The chart above shows (red dots) the US gender gap in political and economic worldviews. The gender gap for Canada is very similar, except the dots are proportionally further left and further down. Michael Adams explains this gender gap in his books Fire & Ice and American Backlash (from which the above chart is adapted) which look at the even larger gaps between the US and the rest of the world’s affluent nations, and between the young and old in the US. A report by three Canadian universities provides a more detailed look at the gender gap.

While it’s dangerous to generalize, these studies suggest that:

One’s dependence on social services or public sector employment has no bearing on political views: the gender gap is the same across all age groups, economic strata and employment sectors
Men tend more towards survival-of-the-fittest political views, a competitive worldview as contrasted to the prevailing cooperative/collaborative worldview of women
The gender gap disappears among only one segment of the population — those who describe themselves as ‘very religious’; that segment skews strongly to the prevailing male worldview of their age cohort

I’m hard put to know what this means, and why it is so pronounced and so recent. What’s your theory? What has happened over the last fifty years to create and then widen a gender gap that, if either gender were deprived of the vote, would make such a profound difference in the present realities and futureprospects for our world?

Categories: Frames, Left & Right

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5 Responses to If Women (or Men) Didn’t Have the Vote

Wendy Lestina says:

February 12, 2007 at 23:03

Here’s my theory. It’s based on comments from my mother (alive, 93), and my aunt (deceased, would be 107). In 1972, my aunt, a lifelong Republican, stood up in her little blue suit at the local Republican Women’s luncheon, and said she thought the war in Vietnam was a bad thing and we should get out. I was stunned by this act of courage (she was then 70). She said, “Look at you. You have the pill. You have a career. You have MS. magazine. I’ve missed the life that would have meant. But I have a voice. That’s my revolution.”Women have not changed (we would have no old growth redwood groves if it weren’t for women’s environmental efforts, just to name one issue among thousands) … the community of courage that has built up over the last several decades has just made it possible for us to speak up/speak out and vote for ourselves.Of the twenty or so married women I know who openly discuss their voting choices, only two have husbands who would be considered progressives.
MLU says:

February 12, 2007 at 23:55

But of course welfare dependence and government employment correlate with higher patterns of voting for democrats. One key demographic you don’t mention is marriage. Married women vote conservative more often than unmarried women. The usual interpretation is that unmarried women with children look to the government to take care of them.And it’s not surprising that women voted more liberal than men. Women consistently score 10 to 20 points lower than men on measures of political knowledge, regardless of their education or income level. Fewer women than men can name their senator or know one First Amendment right. They are less likely to discuss politics, contact public officials or join a political organization.It’s true that the sought after “swing voters” are mostly liberal women. So smart candidates will try to sound personal and try to win a popularity contest that is quite disconnected from policy. Bill Clinton’s strategist, Dick Morris, said the democrats needed to keep black voters “poor, ignorant, and voting democrat.” The same strategy ought to work with unmarried mothers.The current liberal=democrat and conservative=republican configuration is under considerable stress, and it’s possible to hope for a realignment. I dislike both Democrats and Republicans and would like to see a party that combined a sane concern for the environment with greater respect for localism and federalism and a commitment to rule of law, understood as fidelity to a written constitution and caution in regards to all special and local legislation. The original Constitution understood quite well the need for both centralized intelligence and distributed and decentralized decision-making. Madison was a far more brilliant systems thinker than the midgets who’ve interpreted his handiwork to oblivion.
Stephen Bennett says:

February 13, 2007 at 06:17

a simple guess to answer your question: Wimmin’s Lib. LOL. Excellent brain work, Mr. Pollard!Lovely to discover a homo sapiens among us.I’m sick and tired of homo rapiens. (I discovered you when I was looking for stuff on John Gray. Straw Dogs was fun for me as finally someone has put my very old conclusions down on paper and published.)Cheers, and you can quote me: “The end of the world will not be a bang nor a whimper, but a bovine fart.”
Karen M says:

February 13, 2007 at 22:23

Increased equity & parity among women and men. Not that we’ve really arrived there yet… otherwise, Gore would be in his second term, and we would not be in Iraq, etc., etc. We (the US) would be less hated in the rest of the world. I’m not yet 60, but it isn’t that far away anymore. I’m old enough to remember when women’s consciousness raising groups were still embryonic (I was just slightly too young to really take advantage of one then); also: Ms. Magazine, women getting their own credit, not having to quit a job because of getting married or becoming pregnant, no longer having to put up with inappropriate sexist behavior and remarks on the job, flat shoes becoming acceptable footwear, as well as pants. It doesn’t seem all that long ago, sometime during my second marriage (1980’s?), that I heard one of my then-husband’s peers say that what had really changed (or was wrong?) was that now (then) everything had to be negotiated. (Really!) In other words, men/husbands could no longer take it for granted that their wishes would always win out. It seems that a growing proportion of women of each generational group now takes it for granted that their wishes will be considered when a couple has a decision to make. Perhaps a lot of women learned their lesson with Nixon. I remember reading about him before the 1972 election, and being completely horrified by his career up until then. I wasn’t even 20 years old.
thepoetryman says:

March 12, 2007 at 12:21

My theory…Women are smarter than we men. More apt to not want their children to die in a needless illegal war. Less prone to homicidal tendencies. Smarter.