Political Party Gender Gap

In terms of party affiliation, larger proportions of women align themselves with the Democratic party than the Republican party. Similarly, more women are members of the Democratic party than men.

Transcript

So the gender gap in voting, where this gender gap in public opinion sort of plays out, in the voting stage is that we’ve seen since 1980 that there is something of a democratic preference in the votes cast by women. And women are more likely if they express a membership in a political party, they’re more likely to express a membership in the democratic party.

Now this is not to say that there aren’t conservative women and there aren’t republican women. There are and there are a lot of them. But if there was no gender gap for example, and 52 percent of the population voted republican, we would expect to see 52 percent of men voting republican and 52 percent of women voting republican, but that’s not what we see. In fact we see a fairly durable pattern where women are slightly more likely than what you would expect to support democratic candidates and men are somewhat less likely to support democratic candidates.

That gender gap has been as low as 4 percent in recent elections, and as high as 11 percent, with the highest gender gaps being in the 1996 and 2018.