What to make of generational gender gaps
Gen Z women and men at *historic* odds?
In case you missed it, we’ve got more (new) evidence of the growing chasm between Gen Z women and men.
This chart shows a 27-point difference between Gen Z women and men in their preferences for president, based on data from the Times/Siena August “battleground poll” (of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin).1 I’ve visualized it differently below. Sidebar, I think this way of calculating gender gaps is superior ([%Women for Candidate] – [%Men for Candidate] = Gender Gap), something I wrote about in 2016 for the Center for American Women in Politics.
Yes, that’s a big gender gap. But it’s a small voting bloc, in several states, and gender gaps at other intersections are also large. Let’s take a step back to put this gap into context.
What is the voting gender gap?
The gender gap in voting is the difference in support between women and men for a particular candidate. Even when women and men favor the same candidate they may do so by different margins, resulting in a gender gap. For example, in 1984 Reagan won both women and men, but there was still a gender gap because he won more men than women.2 From 1980 to 2012, the gender gap has ranged between 4 and 11 points, with female voters always more likely than male voters to support the Democratic presidential candidate.
In 2016, the gender gap was a record-breaking 13 points – Trump won support from 52 percent of men and just 39 percent of women, according to Pew. In 2020, the gender gap shrank because Biden did better with men than Clinton did (shocked face), while Trump did slightly better with women in 2020 than he had in 2016. In the end, the gender gap was just 7 points in 2020.
So, is 27 points across several battleground states among young women and men big? Sure. But gender gaps aren’t just interesting at the intersection of age.
Which groups exhibit gender gaps?
White women and men, 15 point gap in 2016
Let’s look at gender gaps at the intersection of race. In 2016, Trump won a hefty 62 percent of white men compared to just 47 percent of white women for a 15 point gender gap, according to Pew’s validated voters data.3 But in 2020 the gender gap between white women and men shrank – 57% of white men and 53% of white women voted for Trump according to Pew, just a 4 point gender gap. Biden did much better with white men than Clinton did in 2016, while white women voted more similarly to previous levels in 2020. White women’s politics in the 21st Century needs a book length investigation, but for now let's just call it a reversion to the mean. USC professor Jane Junn and UCLA professor Natalie Masuoka have an academic article about the flawed notion that women are a Democratic voting bloc, given that white women consistently vote Republican, that you should check out.4
Black women and men, 8 point gap in 2020
In 2020, the gender gap between Black women and men was bigger than white women and men – 95% of Black women and 87% of Black men voted for Biden, an 8 point gender gap, according to the Pew validated voters data. While there’s no shortage of stories about Trump’s appeal to working class men of color (Black and Latino), those stories are rarely written through a gender gap lens.
White men and women in the ‘burbs, est. 13 point gap in 2020
Another gender gap that is interesting is the gap between white women and men in the suburbs, which I wrote about ahead of the 2020 election. Our analysis of Democracy Fund UCLA Nationscape polls before the 2020 presidential election showed a 12-13 point gender gap between white men and women in the ‘burbs.
College educated women and men, 15 point gap in 2020
And then there are women and men with a college degree. College educated women are much more Democratic than college educated men — 15 points according to these exit polls from 2020. In so far as college is liberalizing, it’s lopsided! Is it their majors? Every paragraph in this section needs its own post, eh?
The large gender gaps at each of these intersections is worth digging into. But for now, my point is this – gender gaps are everywhere, and at each intersection different mechanisms are probably at play. But if there were a unifying theory of the gender gap it’d probably rely on beliefs about racial and gender equality and their perceived importance in democratic society.
A unifying theory of the gender gap?
I don’t believe one thing explains anything, but attitudes about race and gender (and their perceived importance) help explain gender gaps at each of the intersections just mentioned. Add in the fact that in 2024 the political parties are more sharply divided than ever on issues related to racial and gender equality, and you have a perfect storm for whopping gender gaps. All this is to say, voters are more likely to have formed attitudes about these issues and know which party reflects their formed position and thus sort politically on this basis.5
Let’s start with the direction of attitudes on these issues.
In her new book, Some White Folks: The Interracial Politics and Sympathy, Suffering, and Solidarity, which explores the concept of “racial sympathy,” defined as “white distress over Black misfortune,” political scientist Jennifer Chudy finds gender to be a significant predictor, with racially sympathetic white people more likely to be women. On page 74 she writes
If white women’s racial attitudes shape their political decisions and they have been socialized to sympathize with the mot vulnerable, we have reason to expect that women relative to men, may be more likely to score high on racial sympathy.
Rural women, suburban women, white women, young women, Black women, and even Republican women, have more progressive views on issues related to gender and racial equality than their male counterparts. For example, according to CES data, women are less likely than their male counterparts to harbor sexist and racist views at the intersection of education, race, and age (with the exception of Black women and men who express similarly (low) levels of racism; millennial women and men and also similar on that measure) (cruddy images of charts, below). (Richard Reeves has written “No, young men are not turning away from gender equality” that is also worth reading, despite these charts).
Next, we’ve got differences in perceived importance of these issues. The youngest of these groups (Gen Z) seem to prioritize issues related to gender and racial equality more than previous generations, which explains why they may be sorting on this issue so heavily. So, attitude differences, combined with the party’s clear positioning on these issues, and differences in perceived importance of those issues, help explain why there is a big gap among Gen Z when it comes to who they say they’ll support in 2024.6
Alright, I’ll leave it there for now, although it’s hardly settled and I left a million links on the cutting room floor. If you’re curious what other topics I plan to cover between now and November here’s a preview:
Intraparty gender gaps (how Dem men and women, and GOP men and women differ)
Media coverage gender gaps (how the press cover men and women who run for president differently, why and how it matters)
Fictional presidents in entertainment media, and differences in how male and female presidents assume and wield power
MORE! If there’s a burning gender gap you want me to write about, leave a note in the comments.
As ever, thanks for reading this week’s gender gap. Here’s four more stories to dig into:
RollingStone, Soraya Nadia McDonald. How ‘Scandal’ and ‘The Watchmen’ prepared us for Kamala Harris’s candidacy (August 18, 2024).
McDonald makes the argument that because of scripted television of the last decade or so, we may have a “populace that’s somewhat inoculated against such obvious bait in 2024,” with the bait being misogynoir aimed at Harris. Yes! She explains,
Television is important in this moment because it functions as a laboratory and a playground for the American psyche, allowing us to toy with alternate realities and then discuss them with friends or colleagues or strangers on the internet.
There’s little question that scripted entertainment media has immense consequences on our reality. Political scientist Lilly Goren has written about how fictional portrayals of women in politics on screen impact attitudes about women in politics off screen (See chapter 5 of this volume).
The Atlantic, Megan Garber. The Truth Won’t Matter (December 6, 2023).
This story is almost a year old, but it’s still relevant, and worth revisiting (or reading for the first time, if you missed it). Democrats are riding the high of their successful Convention, but they still face a candidate who has tapped into a growing distrust in institutions, and conspiratorial thinking that has gained traction in certain segments of the electorate. He is (still) their salve. As Garber writes,
A good pitchman identifies a problem and sells a solution. A great one creates the problem to be solved. Trump, having lived his life as an endless ad, has mastered the art of problem-making. He churns out shock and amusement and outrage and absurdity with factory efficiency. He makes the world seem hard. And then he offers himself up as the person who will make America easy again.
New York Times, Jamelle Bouie. If ‘The Lord of the Rings’ Is a Cautionary Tale, It Was Lost on JD Vance (August 3, 2024).
Bouie writes about Vance’s evolution using the Lord of the Rings as a metaphor, aptly noting
In the years since he came on the scene as the author of a best-selling memoir, Vance has transformed himself from a stalwart opponent of Trump to a MAGA acolyte. Where once he denounced Trump as an opiate, he now hails him as the best, last chance to save America from decline and ruin. Vance has jettisoned old friends and old beliefs in a bid for power and influence. He will do and say whatever it takes to reach the point where he holds the power to shape the world. He will save Gondor.
New York Magazine. Rebecca Traister. How Did Republican Women End Up Like This? (June 17, 2024).
I think about this story every time I think about Republican women running for office. And that’s actually a lot, since I’ve been covering the primaries with 538. Here Traister writes about female archetypes, and how there are few archetypes for Republican women, and how they have evolved, especially during the Trump years. It’s brilliant. My favorite quote is this:
For if the women of today’s Republican Party are upending gender conventions in unprecedented fashion, they’re doing it in service of a party that has never been more openly hostile to women and their rights.
Further into the story she gets into how Democratic women running for office have a lot more options when it comes to archetypes, and that’s no accident. It also helps explain why Harris is having a much easier time running “as a woman” in 2024 than Clinton did in 2016 (and all the women before that).
The corresponding article is about the factors contributing to Gen Z men in these states favoring Trump.
Ellie Smeal, president and co-founder of the Feminist Majority Foundation and former president of the National Organization of Women, is credited with coining the term “gender gap” after the 1980 election, when 46 percent of women and 54 percent of men (according to exit polls) voted for Reagan – an 8 point gender gap.
Exit polls have 53 percent of white women backing Trump, but I think Pew’s data is more accurate.
The Junn and Masuoka article uses ANES data, and according to that data, a majority of white women voted for Trump in 2016. Needless to say the dataset analyzed matters for understanding white women voters, but regardless, historically white women are more likely to be Republican, and in elections where they’ve voted Democratic the margin is small.
This is my version of ITS THE ECONOMY STUPID; I look forward to a lifetime of book deals and cable news appearances. Hopefully growing up in Idaho imbued me with an accent!
Not to mention, more Gen Z women than men are going to college, adding more intersections that exacerbate that gap.
The idea that young women are more susceptible to their environment than young men is not only unsupported it’s probably wrong. Reeves writes about this concept of the dandelion and the orchid. Folks here in the comments can look it up. But boys are the orchid and girls are the dandelion—it’s boys who are more sensitive to their environments than girls.
Excellent analysis, Meredith. (Unbelievable that the only other comment so far is from a mansplainer who purports to believe that women are susceptible to brainwashing and supporting 'mainstream ideology'.)