Is there a growing gender gap in the U.S?

Alignment

A recent article in the Financial Times suggests that among young people there is a growing gender gap in political alignment on a spectrum from liberal to conservative.

In last week’s post, I tried to replicate this result using data from the General Social Survey. I generated the following figure, which shows the percentage of liberals minus the percentage of conservatives from 1988 to 2021, among people 18 to 29 years old. The analysis is in this Jupyter notebook.

Women are more likely to say they are liberal by 5-10 percentage points. But there is little or no evidence that the gap is growing.

Party Affiliation

This figure shows the percentage of Democrats minus the percentage of Republicans from 1988 to 2021. The analysis is in this Jupyter notebook.

Women are more likely than men to say they are Democrats. In the 1990s, the gap was almost 20 percentage points. Now it is only 5-10 percentage points. So there’s no evidence this gap is growing — if anything, it is shrinking.

Attitudes and beliefs

To quantify political attitudes, I will take advantage of a method I used in Chapter 12 of Probably Overthinking It. In the General Social Survey, I chose 15 questions where there is the biggest difference in the responses of people who identify as liberal or conservative. Then I estimated the number of conservative responses from each respondent.

The following figure shows the average number of conservative responses for young men and women since 1974. The analysis is in this Jupyter notebook.

Men give slightly more conservative responses than women, on average, but the gap is small and consistent over time — there is no evidence it is growing.

In summary, GSS data provides no support for the claim that there is a growing gender gap in political alignment, affiliation, or attitudes.