Important Issues for Women Voters

As a whole, women are more likely to support social spending on issues such as education, health care and child care.

Transcript

I think that it’s very important to first say that women are very diverse. And they do not have any sort of monolithic opinions on issues.

Having said that, we do see that there are some gender gaps in public opinion. And those gender gaps in public opinion do seem to be playing out in terms of gender gap in vote choice. So for example we see that women are more likely to oppose abortion than are men, interestingly enough. Even though, majorities of both men and women support keeping abortion legal, there is a gender gap where women are less supportive of abortion rights than are men, which is a little counterintuitive and unexpected.

Women are more likely to support social spending, a whole range of social spending. So they’re more likely to support spending on education, healthcare, social welfare, food stamps, things of that nature.

And as public opinion researchers have probed this, it seems that women are more likely to see themselves as needing those, even if they don’t use them right now, they realize that they’re sort of there for the grace of god to get by. They’re more likely to be supportive of government sponsored childcare, which of course fits in with education. Similarly they’re more likely to support environmental regulations and things of that nature.

So women do have a somewhat different vote calculus than what men do on the whole, noting of course there are important exceptions and great diversity of opinion.