What’s Happened to the Gender Gap in Participation? Can We Explain the Changes?

• In Event: Modes of Representation

Abstract

Although the gap in voter turnout gap between women and men closed -- and, then, reversed -- nearly half a century ago, political participation in America has long been characterized by a small, but persistent gender gap with women less active than men. In the late 20th century, that deficit -- which obtained across intersectional groups defined by race and ethnicity as well as gender -- could be explained by gender differences in such critical participatory resources as work-based civic skills, income and, especially, education; such psychological orientations to politics as political interest, efficacy, and knowledge; as well as the absence of women holding visible public office to give cues to women that politics is not a man’s game.

The twenty-first century has witnessed important changes with potential consequences for the gender gap in participation. On the one hand, the steep rise in women’s workforce participation stalled at some point in the 1990s, and progress in diminishing the earnings gap has been slow. On the other, women are now more likely than men to graduate from college, and the educational disparity between men and women has closed; the number of women who hold visible public office has increased substantially, and the nation has had its first female Speaker of the House and first women to run for president on a major party ticket; and current events -- most notably, the election of Donald Trump, the rise of the #MeToo movement in response to revelations about widespread sexual harassment of women by powerful and affluent men across a variety of industries -- have brought renewed attention to the treatment of women in society, politics, and the economy. Surveys showed that, by 2012, the gender gap in citizen political activity had narrowed or, according to some surveys, closed, but that women continue to be severely underrepresented among very big givers.

This paper uses survey data about political activity from the ANES and Pew Research Center, in combination with original data we collected about electoral contexts, to revisit the question of the residual gender gap in participation. We consider the basic descriptive questions of how the size of that gap has changed over time and how any changes vary across particular political acts, in particular, making political contributions, and test alternative explanations for those over-time variations. To the extent possible, we will examine very recent changes and assess whether the current fraught political environment has had a mobilizing impact on political activity and whether that impact varies across groups defined by gender, race or ethnicity, and partisanship.

Authors

• Sara Morell, University of Michigan

• Kay Lehman Schlozman, Boston College

• Nancy Burns, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Ashley E. Jardina, Duke University

• Shauna L. Shames, Rutgers University, Camden