women in society.
To begin this analysis, we need to ask what exactly is a gender gap and how do we
determine that a gender gap exists? We can simply define the gender gap as the difference
between the political attitudes and choices of women and men in society. As the literature about
this subject has developed over the years, several approaches have been utilized to examine and
explain the causes and effects of the gender gap. These approaches include comparisons of
women’s and men’s voting decisions, partisan association and issue preferences. By using these
different methods to analyze the possible gender differences, the literature offers a better
understanding of this commonly used concept.
Those who have utilized the approach of examining the difference in voting decisions
between the sexes have primarily focused on Presidential elections (Mueller 1991; Bendyna &
Lake 1994; Manza & Brooks 1998; Chaney et. al. 1998; Kaufmann & Petrocik 1999). However,
we find a few studies that address voting in Congressional elections (Mattei & Mattei 1998;
Dolan 1998), or perform a more comprehensive analysis by examining voting decisions in both
Presidential and Congressional contests (Seltzer et. al. 1997; Greenberg 2001b).
To a great extent this research has found consistent results that indicate a gender gap
exists. According to these scholars, women in the United States are more likely to vote for the
Democratic candidates while men tend to vote for the Republican candidates. As a result, the
leading measure used for the gender gap in many of these studies is “the difference in
Democratic identification or voting for men versus women” (Kanthak & Norrander 2004, p.
144). However, others define the gap as “the difference between the proportion of women and
the proportion of men voting for the winning candidate” (CAWP 2004). For purposes of
explanation and research here we utilize the first measure.
2
Convention