What do women want?
by digby
It turns out it doesn’t really matter much, at least when it comes to politics. Via Vox:
Looking at both federal and state government, [A recent paper for the NYU Law Review by University of Chicago law professor] Nicholas Stephanopoulos used exit poll data to estimate how race, gender, and income level affect an individual’s level of influence on policy in cases where there is significant disagreement between demographic groups. For example, he looked at where men and women, or whites and African Americans, fell on policies such as raising the minimum wage or mandating that employers provide health insurance, and compared the data to the likelihood of those policies’ passage.
The gaps cited in the study only apply in cases where the opinion differences between groups are substantial (that is, greater than 10 points). However, there are several notable areas in which opinions differ by at least this margin.
For instance, women are much more likely to support policies that help the poor or unemployed and limit the power of Wall Street, including increasing the minimum wage. They are also more in favor of restrictions on gun ownership and of maintaining entitlement programs rather than cutting the federal budget. Meanwhile, men are significantly more likely to support religious exemptions for contraceptive coverage, while women are not.
There are also significant points of disagreement along racial lines. African Americans below the age of 30 are more likely than whites to support the Affordable Care Act. African Americans in general are also much more liberal in their politics — recent statistics show that approximately 80 percent of African Americans are registered Democratic voters, while only 40 percent of whites are. At the same time, a greater percentage of white people support same-sex marriage, perhaps because significantly more white Americans believe that people are born — rather than choose to be — gay. Among the millennial generation, white people are significantly more likely to identify themselves as pro-life compared with African Americans.
In cases with strong disagreement, like the above, Stephanopoulos has found that women fare far worse than men, while racial divides exist both between African American and white constituents, and between non-Hispanic whites and Hispanics. Income also seems to play a role, as those in the top 10th percentile had sway over the voices of those lower down the economic ladder.
Among the demographics Stephanopoulos looked at — including racial minorities and low-income individuals — women have the least influence on policy at both the state and federal level. In cases where there’s major disagreement between men and women, the chance of a policy taking effect falls the more it’s supported by women, and it falls dramatically: from 80 percent to about 10 percent.
Similarly, state policy changes reflect men’s preferences but not women’s. Using slightly different methodology, Stephanopoulos compared states’ overall ideological bent (as measured by actual policies enacted) to the bent of different demographic groups within the state. As this graph shows, women’s political ideology has almost no effect on states’ overall leanings:
Stephanopoulos says he was most surprised by the gap between men and women — a gap larger than those between black and white or rich and poor Americans. “When you think about what cleavages are in the news,” he said in an interview, “you hear about race and income, but you don’t hear as much about gender differences in terms of influence.”
I don’t think this matters to very many people, but it’s interesting. To the extent that men and women differ in their priorities and concerns, women are the losers across the board — the biggest losers among any demographic group. This is not a matter of class since women are equal in every class. So, whatever could it be?
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