They are more progressive, they are more conservative: why do women and men vote differently and how do politicians take advantage of it?

Women and men vote differently.

This statement, so emphatic, so little nuanced, was already true in the late 1970s, but then it was irrelevant.

The gender gap in electoral behavior was already perceptible, it had sociological interest, but it did not decide elections.

Around this time, a certain progressive bias began to be attributed to women, while men seemed somewhat more inclined to support the warmongering and masculine discourse of the conservative revolution of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

The gap that was hinted at in those years gradually widened over the next couple of decades, and the data suggest that it has accelerated significantly from 2015 onwards.

So much so that it is very likely that it will be decisive in the November presidential elections in the United States.

As predicted by Harvard political scientist Pippa Norris, the author along with Ronald Inglehart of the influential essay

, if women go to the polls somewhat higher than men in key states like Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, Trump will lose.

In a sense, these elections could turn out to be a distant duel between middle-aged white men and young women of all colors.

It seems very likely that Trump will lose the popular vote, but the electoral map favors him.

Hence his strategy of injecting an extra dose of testosterone into his campaign, to excite the collective of angry men, who constitute the hard core of his followers, and to discourage women, who are more likely to stay at home when campaigns get muddy and politics is beginning to seem like a masculinized dirty game to the core.

In Spain, according to Marta Fraile, a CSIC researcher, "it is very likely that an electoral gender gap has existed for years similar to that of the rest of Western democracies, but until now we had no empirical data to confirm that intuition."

We already have them.

Francisco Camas, researcher at Metroscopia and author of the book

, already detected in 2017 a certain rejection of the new policy among Spanish women and support for traditional political options (PP and PSOE) higher than that of men.

At the time, it seemed “an interesting phenomenon, but still not very significant.

Today, the data allow us to speak of a firm gender gap that is growing ”, attributable, above all,“ to the irruption, with an electoral quota of between 10 and 15%, of a very male voting party, such as it's VOX ”.

Abascal's formation has "between 65 and 70% men among its voters."

An “overwhelming figure, with few precedents in parties of some importance”, and that, by contrast, “has feminized the vote of the rest of political formations, starting with the Popular Party, which is now finding its main electoral fishing ground among women. of more than 50 years ”.

The political scientist Sílvia Claveria, author of

, points out that “women will be cautious and hesitant in our electoral behavior, but we are not stupid: if a party like Vox presents a very aggressive anti-feminist agenda, attacking the policies of gender equality or reproductive rights, it is logical that we do not vote for it and that we support options that may serve as a containment dam against that discourse ”.

Claveria believes that the emergence of identity populisms has served, in Europe and the United States, as an “accelerator” for a gap that already existed and that had been growing strongly for several decades: “Until the eighties, women participated much less in They tended to support moderate conservative political formations, some of them religiously inspired, to a greater extent than men.

That was the traditional gender gap.

Then two phenomena of opposite sign coincided in time, the conservative revolution and the generalization of the second feminist wave, and this caused women to list, in general, towards more progressive positions ”.

Ernesto Pascual, a political scientist at the UOC (Open University of Catalonia), agrees with Claveria that it has been “the populist, nativist and male right that has changed female electoral behavior in recent years”.

Pascual highlights that women “are 39% less likely to vote for parties of the extreme right or identity right.

In general terms, women have been slowly moving towards more progressive positions for decades ”.

But this displacement of the axis could also be read in the opposite direction: "It is the right, or a certain right, which has been enlisting in positions contrary to gender equality and, consequently, moving away from women."

Alba Alonso, political scientist and professor at the University of Santiago de Compostela, identifies two key factors to explain the gap: “Women, due to their position in society, consider welfare policies more relevant, they feel aversion to the most extreme partisan options and they attach great importance to promoting equality ”.

In Spain, according to the academic, PSOE and PP are mainly fed by the female vote ("54.1% and 57.9% respectively, according to data from the CIS post-election study for the November general elections"), while Vox and Unidos Podemos have a fairly masculinized electorate.

Sílvia Claveria speaks of “the paradox of left-wing radicalism” to explain why Podemos, “despite its firm feminist agenda”, had only 41.6% women among its voters in the last elections: “The female vote rejects in to a greater extent to the new parties because they are not considered as effective tools of political intervention as the already consolidated ones ”.

Furthermore, the qualitative data also point to "a rejection of its centralized and belligerent leadership model."

Pablo Iglesias tends to "fall worse for women than men, his radicalism is unsympathetic to a female electorate who prefers moderate, constructive attitudes and focused on the search for consensus."

It also occurs in other societies, such as the United States, where cultural wars and, more specifically, gender policies have entered the political agenda with force: “Recent qualitative studies suggest that women over 50 who have worked in They tend to reject the third wave feminist program of the Democratic Party, because they feel deprived of their cultural identity and social capital.

In some cases, this predisposes them to support someone like Trump, representing a traditional way of understanding the gender roles with which they most identify, because it gave meaning to their lives ”.

Marta Fraile recognizes the importance of qualitative factors that make any generalization an abuse: “Women make up 50% of the world's population.

Attributing a common political sensitivity to them would be absurd ”.

She does believe that “deeply rooted social roles” play a perceptible role, such as the greater degree of “empathy, solidarity and instinct for collaboration and protection, which predisposes women, in the current context, to reject radical voting and support in more to moderate and progressive options ”.

Is it a strong trend or something temporary?

“In social sciences it is risky to make forecasts”, answers Fraile, “but as long as there are distortion factors such as parties with patriarchal reaction agendas or candidates with a masculinity as toxic as Donald Trump, I think it is very likely that women and men will continue voting each more and more different ”.

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