Why doesn’t a woman vote more like a man?
It is the question of this political season, for clearly, she doesn’t.
Among men, President Clinton has been either in a dead heat with Bob Dole in the polls or leading by four to six percentage points. But among women, he has commanded a whopping lead of between 20 and 26 percentage points.
Thus the gender gap, source of woe for Dole and subject of exhaustive analysis.
Women have become the focal point of this election — courted, polled, studied and featured in newsmagazine cover stories. At times, it has seemed that hardly a “soccer mom” — political shorthand for the middle-class suburban mothers who have provided Clinton with much of his lead — has been left uninterviewed.
Jack Kemp even added them to a list of hyphenated Americans during the vice presidential debate with a reference to “African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latino-Americans, female-Americans.”
The gender gap is the tendency of women to vote more Democratic than men. They have been doing so since 1980, and the phenomenon is seen in every demographic slice of the electorate. Even among voters who lean strongly toward Bob Dole, such as evengelical Christians, men lean more strongly toward Dole than do women.
“At every level of comparable males to females, you see a gender gap in place,” said Linda DiVall, a Republican pollster who advises Dole on the gender gap.
The gap works both ways, she pointed out: White men tend to vote Republican.
The gender gap has been a major focus of the election.
“The gap is at record highs right now,” said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. “In 1980, it was a presidential thing. Now there’s a party identification gap . . . (which) means you see this behavior up and down the ticket.”
But other analysts say the gap is no bigger than it was in 1980, when it was first identified.
Some pollsters have adopted a different way of computing the gap that doubles the figure, said Jody Newman, former executive director of the National Women’s Political Caucus, who is completing a book on the gender gap.
When you use the same method to look at every election, the gap has remained constant, she said; Dole has no more of a gender gap than Ronald Reagan or George Bush.
“The gender gap doesn’t mean, `How are you doing among women?’ ” Newman said. “It means the difference between women and men.
“Bob Dole doesn’t have a problem with women; he has a problem with people.”
Whether or not the gap has grown, it is undeniably there. And though issues that affect children, like education, health care and the environment, do resonate more strongly with women, the gender gap has more far-reaching implications.
“It has very little to do with whether the candidate is a woman or a man. It has very little to do with abortion. It has very little to do with equal rights,” said Newman.
It has almost everything to do with a fundamentally different view of the role of government, she said. Women are more likely than men to think government should play a more active role in helping people, while men lean toward cutting the budget.
The reason, she said, is that women are more likely to be involved with their children’s schools and their elderly parents’ care and can therefore see the results of government involvement in those areas.
“Women get angry with government, but they aren’t as anxious to blow it up; they are much more eager to fix it,” said Patricia Schroeder, the retiring Democratic congresswoman from Colorado.
“Men tend to believe government is part of the problem, not the solution,” DiVall said.
It has not always been so. Women once were more likely than men to vote Republican. Only since 1980 have they have leaned Democratic.
“A much higher percentage of women were homemakers in the ’50s and ’60s,” Newman said. “Homemakers were predominantly Republican.”
But when they started working in large numbers, she said, they became less conservative and more Democratic.
Karlyn Bowman, a resident fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, thinks that men’s longer experience in the workplace has led them in the opposite direction.
“Men are perhaps more skeptical about the federal government’s role in shaping the work environment through economic policy and tax policies,” she said.
The contrast can be seen when men and women are asked whether the federal budget should be cut, said Guy Molyneux, vice president of Democratic pollsters Peter D. Hart Research Associates.
“The first reaction of men is to think this is a good thing; they don’t think to ask who is going to get hurt here,” he said. “Women are quicker to see the potential downside for children and families.
“It’s a compassion gap, really.”
Indeed, when you ask soccer moms — in this case, several mothers who were watching their sons’ Maine South Hawks beat the West Leyden Eagles — what they worry about for the future, they are likely to say other people.
“If you cut taxes, you cut a lot of programs — and the ones that are going to be hurt are the ones people need,” said Maria Salvador, 43, a Harwood Heights bookkeeper who plans to vote for Clinton.
Men care about other people, but not to the personal, gut-level extent that women do, said Donna Kazmierski, 45, a dental hygienist from Park Ridge who is undecided but leans toward Clinton.
She worries about families that have to work so hard to make ends meet that they don’t have enough time for their children and often wishes there were some way she could help.
“My husband is just worried about right here — what’s happening with us,” she said. “He tells me, `You worry too much.’ “
“Men know how to separate their lives from the world around them,” said Judy Dobrik, 38, a teacher from Park Ridge who has not decided on her vote.
State Comptroller Loleta Didrickson, one of the top Republican female officeholders in Illinois, contends that the gap can be closed if the Republican Party convinces women that it offers the better deal for them.
“I don’t want government taking care of me, I don’t want my husband taking care of me — I want to take care of myself,” she said.
“That is the 15 percent tax cut (proposed by Dole). That is cash in my pocket that I get to keep, and it doesn’t matter whether I’m a woman or a man.”
But most women don’t look at personal economics that way, said Lake.
“College-educated men feel, `Give me the money, I can figure it out myself,’ ” she said. “College-educated women have a lot less confidence that they can do it.”
Women are also more concerned about whether others can do it, said Mary Beth Cahill, executive director of EMILY’s List, a political action committee that contributes to Democratic women candidates who support abortion rights.
“Men have the attitude, `Tax me less and leave me alone,’ whereas women think there are things we have to do together as a society — having cleaner air, educating our children,” she said. “It’s really a different way of viewing the world.”
But hold that halo; women aren’t operating solely on altruism.
While men feel they can take care of their families if they can just earn more money and pay less taxes, women have no such confidence.
In fact, they are more likely to imagine needing some kind of government assistance themselves.
“Two-thirds of minimum wage earners in this country are women,” pointed out Susan Carroll, senior research associate at Rutgers University’s Center for the American Woman and Politics, who has been studying women’s voting patterns for 20 years.
“Women are less likely to earn as much as men, less likely to have pension plans or benefits. They are in more precarious positions. Even women who seem well off are just a divorce away from finding themselves on the welfare rolls.”
Even financially secure women see themselves as having a highly personal stake in, for example, assistance programs for the elderly; if such programs are cut, responsibility for caring for elderly relatives will most likely fall to them.
There is similar self-interest involved in the appeal to women of policies that give them practical help, such as guaranteed insurance coverage of 48-hour hospital stays for childbirth, the Family and Medical Leave Act and portable health care.
And in a way, they see helping others as a way of ensuring that their own children’s world will be a better place.
“It affects your kid,” Kazmierski put it. “My kids are from a stable, two-parent family, but who are they going to marry? If we don’t have the services to provide for what (other children) need, what’s going to happen to them?”
Conversely, men’s emphasis on economic issues and cutting taxes does not necessarily bespeak meanness.
Democratic media consultant David Axelrod pointed out that job insecurity has hit men accustomed to lifetime employment harder than women, who are more recent entrants to the work force.
“Incomes among men have been declining,” he said. “The whole American Dream aspect is in jeopardy. Men tend to be more resentful about it; they feel victimized by it more.”
Indeed, the gender gap may have been shaped less by how women feel than by how men have changed.
Since 1980, men have been turning Republican faster than women have turned Democratic.
Between 1978 and 1994, the proportion of men voting Republican swelled 17 percent, according to the University of Michigan’s National Election Studies Series, while the segment of those voting Democratic shrank 10 percent.
The proportion of women voting Republican increased a mere 8 percent in that time. The proportion of women voting Democratic decreased only 3 percent. From nearly identical patterns in 1978, by 1994 47 percent of men voted Republican and 42 percent Democratic, compared with 52 percent of women Democratic and 38 percent Republican.
Men have also become more conservative. In 1972, 29 percent of men identified themselves as conservatives; in 1994, 43 percent did.
The catalyst, Carroll said, was Ronald Reagan, whose brand of conservatism proved deeply attractive to men.
“There was something about Reagan — the toughness on foreign policy, the get-government-out-of-your-lives (stance), his macho, cowboy image” that appealed strongly to men, she said.
And with Reagan pulling the Republican Party sharply right, she said, the parties took on more distinct differences from each other, accentuating differences between men and women voters.
“The positions became much clearer, more polarized,” she said.
The stakes in negotiating the gender gap are high. Women are far from a monolithic voting bloc, but their sheer numbers make them a political prize.
“Women have outvoted men in every election since 1980 in terms of voter turnout,” Carroll said. They are also 52 percent of the population.
“If past elections are any guide, about two million more women will vote (this year) than men,” said Bowman.
The result has been on clear display.
“We have seen both campaigns feature more women spokespersons, spouses included, move the message more consistently to personal stories of achievement and focus more on hope than combat” — themes and styles that appeal to women, said Anita Perez Ferguson, president of the National Women’s Polical Caucus.
In the end, one of the biggest political differences between women and men is the time they have to devote to it.
“My husband watched the presidential debate,” Kazmierski said. “I was in and out. We’re always doing several things at once.”
