Derek Thompson writes:

Men have for decades preferred Republican candidates, while women have for decades leaned Democratic. In a 2024 analysis of voter data, Catalist, a progressive firm that models election results, “found that the gender divide was roughly the same for all age groups in recent elections,” [Rose] Horowitch wrote.

One suggested explanation for these apparent contradictions is that the most alarming surveys are showing us the future, and this November will establish a new high-water mark in gender polarization, with women breaking hard for Kamala Harris and men voting overwhelmingly for Donald Trump. Another possibility is that these surveys are a little misleading, and gender polarization has already peaked, in which case this is much ado about nothing.

A third possibility interests me the most. John Sides, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, says the gender gap is real; it’s just not what many people think it is. “The parties are more polarized by gender attitudes than by gender itself,” he told me.

If that sounds a bit academic, try a thought experiment to make it more concrete. Imagine that you are standing on the opposite side of a wall from 100 American voters you cannot see. Your job is to accurately guess how many of the folks on the other side of the wall are Republicans. You can only ask one of the following two questions: “Are you a man?” or “Do you think that men face meaningful discrimination in America today?” The first question is about gender. The second question is about gender attitudes, or how society treats men and women. According to Sides, the second question will lead to a much more accurate estimate of party affiliation than the first. That’s because the parties aren’t remotely united by gender, Sides says. After all, millions of women will vote for Trump this year. But the parties are sharply divided by their cultural attitudes toward gender roles and the experience of being a man or woman in America.

The fable above plays out in survey data, too. In the March 2024 Views of the Electorate Research (VOTER) Survey, 39 percent of men identified as Republican versus 33 percent of women. That’s a six-point gap. But when the VOTER Survey asked participants how society treats, or ought to treat, men and women, the gender gap exploded. Sixty-one percent of Democrats said women face “a lot” or “a great deal” of discrimination while only 19 percent of Republicans said so. In this case, the gender-attitude gap was more than six times larger than the more commonly discussed gender gap.

To Sides, the conclusion is obvious: The political parties are more divided by their views on gender than they are divided by gender itself. It’s not “men are from Mars, and women are from Venus.” It’s “Republican men and women are from Mars, and Democratic men and women are from Venus.” [Continue reading…]