The Politics Gender Gap

Is it really about reproductive rights, or something else?

The gender gap in politics is growing¹ among young people. While young men’s views are mostly staying the same, young women are moving to the left, adopting what they are calling “anti-patriarchal” values. More precisely, when asked what their primary political issue is, young women say “reproductive rights”, while young men say “the economy.”² Why might this be the case?

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At the most obvious level, being able to control one’s reproduction is important, and has been part of all, or nearly all, human cultures. This inherently manifests differently in men and in women; to use one framing from evolutionary biology that holds up across nearly all species that reproduce sexually and have any kind of parental care: males tend to invest more pre-zygotically, females tend to invest more post-zygotically. In layman’s terms, that means that males tend to spend more time in courtship and wooing before egg and sperm ever meet, while females usually spend more time taking care of the nest and the babies afterwards. Humans are a unique case, because we tend towards monogamy, and so tend towards greater similarity in our behavior than do our ancestors. But differences do persist.

Women have been experiencing unwanted pregnancies for many thousands of years. Medical abortion is relatively new, but there have been herbalists for, again, many thousands of years, providing plants that can induce miscarriage to women in want or in need. Modern abortion can be considered an extension of that long history.

It is also true that in general, women are more concerned about social issues, while men are more concerned about economic issues. This tracks perfectly with well replicated research which finds that, on average, girls and women are more interested in people, boys and men are more interested in things. Social issues are about people; money is a thing.

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That’s all relatively straightforward. Part of what is happening, though, is both an increasingly familiar story, and has nothing inherently to do with reproductive rights at all.

In the “Big Five” personality inventory, women, on average, are reliably higher than men on two of the five big traits: agreeableness and neuroticism. Here are clinical definitions of those two terms (edited for concision), from a paper addressing sex differences in personality³:

Agreeableness

Agreeableness comprises traits relating to altruism, such as empathy and kindness. Agreeableness involves the tendency toward cooperation, maintenance of social harmony, and consideration of the concerns of others (as opposed to exploitation or victimization of others). Women consistently score higher than men on Agreeableness and related measures, such as tender-mindedness.

Neuroticism

Neuroticism describes the tendency to experience negative emotion and related processes in response to perceived threat and punishment; these include anxiety, depression, anger, self-consciousness, and emotional lability. Women score higher than men on indices of anxiety and low self-esteem. The one facet of Neuroticism in which women do not always exhibit higher scores than men is Anger, or Angry Hostility.

So women have higher agreeableness and neuroticism than men, on average.

Part of what that means in real life is that women are more likely to be compassionate, root for the underdog, and have their fears used against them to get them to play along with a narrative or prescription that is being proposed. Thus, if a right appears to be being taken away from a group—even better if that group can be characterized as already oppressed or downtrodden—women are more likely to have a strong emotional reaction, and to rank that situation high on their list of concerns.

I think that many young women would claim—rightly or not—that they do not care about abortion rights as fiercely for themselves as for others, the others for whom those rights are being taken away. I suspect that a higher proportion of young women in blue states, where abortion will remain safe and legal (and hopefully rare), are energized about this topic, than are young women in red states, where abortions have indeed become more difficult to access. I suspect this, but do not have the data to back it up.

This fits with various other political magic tricks that have transpired over the last several years, most saliently in the Black Lives Matter movement which, while spearheaded by black people, was populated among the rank and file mostly with comfortably middle class white teenagers and young adults (some of whom, by my observation, had become homeless by choice, but that is another story entirely), and also mothers (gauging by who joined the daily protests in Portland in the Summer and early Fall of 2020, before those same protests reliably morphed into riots every evening). It was that army of white middle-class people who felt certain that they were fighting for black people, even when actual black people stood up and said—hey, quit it, I can speak for myself, and this cause that you are supporting is not what it appears.

Abortion rights isn’t that, exactly—abortion is what it appears, I think, although there is a lot of important nuance to be had in the details of when, in particular—but I do think that the trend of middle-class white people—specifically, women—without much experience of lives other than their own, wanting to become knights in shining armor for a perceived underclass that is not themselves, is part of what is happening here. That fact is obscured by the fact that young women are obviously the demographic most likely to seek abortions.

Aside: One sad irony is that some of the young women who are most energized by the threat to abortion rights, are also likely to be the young women who have already voluntarily sterilized themselves either by falling into the trans miasma and getting hooked on destructive cross sex hormones during puberty, or by actually just signing up for voluntary sterilizations, which I know some women in their 20s to have done. This, on the basis that they are “certain” that they will never want children.

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Young women are being played by a party that is quite willing to lie to them to get them to do what it wants—to stoke their fears and get them so energized and focused that they cannot see anything else that is true. It’s Potemkin politics: women who are rageful at the loss of abortion rights may pay less attention to other facts. Facts like everything from fruit to houses is far more expensive than they were just four years ago, the Democrats have become the war party, and our health, schools and infrastructure are all failing.

While some may be constitutionally incapable of seeing the broader issues—that our First Amendment is our most precious asset as Americans, and that the Second is there to protect the First—everyone can tell that something is off. Our dollars are going less far. The cities are in distress, and so are the people in them. Politicians are not being straight with us. Nearly nobody is taking mRNA shots anymore, and yet we’re not talking about why.

Everyone has had some sort of an awakening. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance for the party that has been at the forefront of the chaos to put everyone back to sleep, or at least into a state of vaguely aroused confusion. This is accomplished in part with bread and circuses, but mostly, now, with fear and anger.

Stoke the anger of the voters, create fear where there was none, and many people will have no idea that they are being had.

1. I usually now refuse to use the word “gender” when “sex” is what is meant, as is the case here, but “gender gap” is widely understood by people, while “sex gap” would likely just be confusing.

2. Unpublished data from The Daily Caller; will link here once it is published.

3. Weisberg et al 2011. Gender differences in personality across the ten aspects of the Big Five. Frontiers in psychology, 2, p.11757.