Republican Women Voters: Religion, Education, and Opinion on Gender Issues

• In Event: Gendered Attitudes and Women’s Interests

Abstract

According to a 2019 National Geographic/Ipsos Poll, forty percent of women in America report having personally experienced discrimination on the basis of their gender. Though alarmingly widespread, the experience of sex discrimination and its impact on women’s political consciousness is unlikely to be uniform. In the aftermath of the 2016 election and in the midst of the #MeToo era, the personal experiences of women have taken center stage in the political arena, prompting divergent reactions among women on the left and the right. Even within partisan constituencies, women evince remarkable heterogeneity in their perspectives on gender-related political questions, with religious and educational background carving a particularly pronounced schism among conservative women. This paper is a systematic examination of the effect of religion and education among Republican female voters in the U.S. on their opinions on gender issues. We utilize two sources of data in the analysis: the 2019 NatGeo/Ipsos poll data, and responses from in-depth interviews conducted in person with attendees of the 2020 Republican National Convention. The gender issues we examine include: perceptions of gender equity, attitudes about women’s political leadership, feminist self-identification, and prioritization of women’s issues in politics. We hypothesize both religiosity and formal educational attainment, along with personal experiences with discrimination to influence opinion, and analyze the interaction effects between these factors. Our research seeks a better explanation of Republican women’s attitudes during a political era where gender alone is not a salient enough identity to predict how women will vote.

Authors

• Jane Y. Junn, University of Southern California

• Kayla Wolf, University of Southern California

• Laura C. Brisbane, University of Southern California