Women Voters and the Gender Gap

This report examines women’s political power within diverse state political ecosystems and illustrates that increasing women’s political power is a multi-site, multiracial, and bipartisan endeavor.

This chapter provides an overview of scholarship examining the behavior and influence of women voters in United States history, from the fight for suffrage to the emergence of gender gaps in vote choice, voter preferences, and voter turnout. Dittmar exposes and explains gender differences between men and women voters, as well as among women, and discusses how those differences influence the electoral process. This chapter introduces subsequent chapters in the volume that analyze gender differences in specific issue areas such as guns and crime, abortion, and the role of government. 

Women and men are political actors with distinct political preferences. These differences – or gender gaps – emerged in the 1980s and have been persistent since then in vote choice, party identification, and presidential performance ratings. In its latest edition of "A Closer Look," CAWP highlights what we know about gender gaps and asks key questions about potential gender differences in voting in 2014.

An analysis of women voters and the role they will play in the 2012 elections. 

This edited volume contains chapters by leading experts in the field of American elections and political behavior. Sanbonmatsu's chapter reviews research on gender differences in mass behavior and candidacy. She argues that future scholarship should focus on understanding the conditions under which gender structures political behavior and elections. In addition to calling for research on when gender as a social category is cued in politics, she argues that elections can create gender as a category: political behavior and elections themselves can shape beliefs about gender, instructing society about what men and women are like. 

The 2nd edition of this textbook describes the role of gender in the American electoral process through the 2008 elections. Tailored for courses on women and politics, elections, and gender politics, it strikes a balance between highlighting the most important developments for women as voters and candidates in the 2008 elections and providing a deeper analysis of the ways that gender has helped shape electoral politics in the United States.  Individual chapters demonstrate the importance of gender in understanding presidential elections, voter participation and turnout, voting choices, the participation of African American women

The desire to elect more women to public office is likely to affect a range of political behaviors and may explain the relatively low levels of women's descriptive representation overall. Yet, little is known about the public's view of the ideal gender composition of government. The authors find that the public expresses a preference for higher levels of women's representation than the country has experienced. Women are more likely than men to express a view, though men and women do not differ in their preferences on the ideal percentage of male officeholders. The article examines the role of gender stereotypes and the experience of being

This book concentrates on the gender gap in voting--the difference in the proportion of women and men voting for the same candidate. Evident in every presidential election since 1980, this polling phenomenon reached a high of 11 percentage points in the 1996 election. Contributors discuss the history, complexity, and ways of analyzing the gender gap in voting; the gender gap in relation to partisanship; motherhood, ethnicity, and the impact of parental status on the gender gap; and the gender gap in races involving female candidates.