About GENDER GAP

What are gender gaps? Gender gaps are disparities between men and women, and they exist everywhere. Pay gender gaps, partisan gender gaps, mental health gender gaps, gender gaps in film screen time, and more. Layer in race, and you’ve got a whole ‘nother story (especially when looking at gender gaps in vote choice).

I’m writing about gender gaps because I think they are key to understanding social change, and our current political landscape in the US. There has been an enormous upheaval of longstanding gender norms in the past decade or so, and plenty of people are looking at certain gender gaps (like education, where women now outrun men) and panicking in ways that risks slowing the progress women have made. They’re taking the wrong lessons from these gender gaps.

So, who am I? I am a political scientist, with a PhD from University of California, Santa Barbara. My dissertation was interested in the impact of personality traits on susceptibility to media frames, but my first love (and first book) is studying gender and media. When I was a senior in college I had an internship with the Associated Press abroad (in London) during the 2004 US Presidential Election. I was consumed by the battle of machismo between Kerry and Bush, and that experience inspired my first graduate level paper, and eventually my first book, Masculinity, Media and the American Presidency. After all, men have gender too. Since that book, I’ve written more things about masculinity in American politics, nearly always thinking about how it impacts the women with political ambition, and thus our system of democratic governance.

This newsletter is my attempt to bring insights, reflection, and nuance to the conversation about gender, and gender gaps, in American politics.

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