Swing it sisters

The difference between men's and women's voting patterns is preoccupying American pundits in the last few weeks of the presidential election.

American politics has a strong propensity for putting labels on years when elections are held. Back in 1992 there was The Year of the Woman Candidate, with the election of Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein as the two Senators for California among a swathe of female winners across the country. The mid-term elections in 1994 brought the Year of the Angry White Male - sweeping the Republicans into control of Congress for the first time in 40 years and making House of Representatives leader Newt Gingrich one of the most significant figures in the United States.

Now 1996 looks set to become what Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman, writing during the Democratic convention in Chicago, called the Year of the Woman Voter. The differential between the voting patterns of men and women has become a preoccupation of the political classes and their watchers.

The presidential election goes into its final few weeks with the possibility that women may go one way and men the other. This probably will not happen if President Clinton maintains the huge margins shown in the first poll following the Democratic convention. But if the gap closes, as many commentators expect, Clinton's margin of victory may rely on the women's vote.

Speaking at the annual convention of the American Political Science Association in San Francisco last month, Laura Winsky Mattei of the State University of New York, Buffalo, cited a recent poll showing that 53 per cent of women intended to vote for Clinton compared with 30 per cent of men (the sample included a number of don't knows).

Prominent as it has become in the 1990s - one paper noted that pollsters specialising in the womens' vote were building significant careers both sides of the political divide - there is nothing particularly new in the gender gap. Marianne Githens of Goucher College, Baltimore, said: "There is some polling evidence to suggest that there was a gap in the 1930s, with women more concerned about peace . . . It may have been a spillover from the womens' peace movement during the first world war."

But it was not until 1952 that the issue first attained some prominence. The election that year was between General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, and the liberal Democrat Adlai Stevenson. It was noted that Eisenhower, a comfortable winner as he would be again in 1956, had done unusually well among women. Githens recalled that the political science of the time was reluctant to credit women with sophisticated powers of reasoning. "It was said that Eisenhower had a romantic appeal to women as a war hero - I could never fathom this myself. And it was also pointed out that Stevenson had been divorced and this was assumed to diminish his appeal." She thinks that Eisenhower's promise to end the Korean war may have had more to do with his success.

Having diverged in the 1950s, the sexes appeared to converge in the subsequent two decades - Nixon would famously claim that the main difference between them was that "Men pull the voting lever harder". As Anne Costain of the University of Colorado noted: "There was an apparent equilibrium, so there was very little talk about it."

The Reagan-Carter election of 1980 signalled the opening of the modern gender gap, with women tending to the Democrats and men to the Republicans. So it has remained ever since. Rhode Island representative Claudia Schreiner may have played on President Reagan's Hollywood past in arguing that "in the end Ronald Reagan may not get the girl" but Reagan captured the majority of the female vote in 1980 and 1984.

To do so has become increasingly important. From being less likely to vote than men before the 1970s, women (living longer, the majority of the population) have become more likely voters.

But it is important to remember that the gender gap is an inherently relative concept, defined by the actions of men as much as by women. The really dramatic shift in party identification in recent years has been men moving to the Republicans. Ted Jelen of Benedictine University, Illinois, reminded the San Francisco meeting that: "All groups of white voters have been moving towards the Republicans in recent years - the difference is that men are moving a great deal faster. It is possible that the gap is a temporary phenomenon".

All the evidence is that the gender gap is a complex, shifting phenomenon and may only account for a few per cent difference in voting. But most elections are won and lost by a few per cent. Hence the emphasis on women at both conventions - more than half of Democrat delegates were female, while the Republicans attempted to make up for the distinctly male composition of the hall by giving high-profile slots to speakers like Representative Susan Molinari of New York.

But most observers at San Francisco felt the Republicans were badly handicapped in the battle for the women's vote. Why this should be so attracts a number of explanations. Pippa Norris of Harvard University has studied gender voting in 15 democracies, noting that the US is grouped with Portugal, Spain, Germany and Denmark as countries where women tend to the left while in Britain, Australia, Italy and Ireland they tend to the right.

Heather Hill and Claudia Deane of the University of Michigan tested the proposition that "women deal with more concrete considerations, while men deal more in the abstract" and concluded that "gender does not affect processes of reasoning". What they found was that women espoused more liberal values on several issues - a 1987 National Electoral Survey study found 32 per cent of men agreeing that the government should cut taxes, even if it meant cutting services, against only 19.4 per cent of women.

Greg Adams of Carnegie-Mellon University noted that there was a strong element of practical experiential self-interest in this with "the feminisation of poverty" and the role of women as carers for both children and the old. Norris echoes this and does not expect the attack on welfare by Clinton to seriously affect his lead among women: "Whatever they may think of this, they know there is some hope on these issues with the Democrats and none at all from the Republicans." Githens argues that the Democrats have done something for women, with measures to help single mothers and domestic violence, while the Republican leadership in Congress has offered nothing.

The Republicans are concerned about their difficulties with women voters. But party leadership aims here run into conflict with the party grassroots, with Christian conservatives setting the agenda in much of the country.

Historic party positions on the Equal Rights Amendment have shifted, with the Democrats reversing their traditional scepticism towards it during the 1960s. And this has been heavily reinforced by the Republican position on abortion. Michael Traugott of the University of Michigan points out that most men have pro-choice attitudes. "Put in these terms there is very little difference between the sexes. But the issue has an extremely high priority among women and a much lower one among men. Reagan, Bush and Dole have all opposed a woman's right to choose." In this light Clinton's convention declaration that while he was personally opposed to abortion, it was a matter for the individual woman, her doctor and God stood out strongly in contrast to the Republican call for an anti-abortion constitutional amendment.

Beth Reingold, Heather Foust and Paige Schneider of Emory University, Atlanta, point to a consistent distinction between the way in which men and women evaluate presidential candidates: "Men are more likely, often much more likely, than women to evaluate candidates on the basis of personality traits and issue positions traditionally associated with masculinity." That of appearing a "strong leader" epitomises these - enabling Republican assaults on Democrats Jimmy Carter and Michael Dukakis in particular. But they also point to a consistent shift over the years towards valuing "feminine" attributes such as caring and honesty.

Even so, they note: "To put it bluntly, presidential hopefuls must prove they are manly enough to lead the country." The male choice has predominated at every presidential election for the last 40 years.

And there remain formidable obstacles for female candidates. Only about 10 per cent of Congress is female, perhaps because of candidates' dependence on fund-raising abilities when the overwhelming majority of donors is male.

Norris nominates New Jersey governor Christie Todd Whitman, a young pro-choice, tax-cutting conservative, as a Republican presidential nominee of the future if the party can throw off the stranglehold of the anti-choice Christian conservatives. But her potential battle for hearts and minds has already been summed up in a valedictory interview in George magazine with Pat Schoeder, the Colorado female representative who ran for the Democratic nomination in 1988. "Voters would say to me 'We're so glad you are running - those other guys look alike, dress alike, sound alike. But you don't look presidential'. I said: 'Well I know I don't look presidential. No one that's ever run for president has looked like me. Men have a presidential uniform and that's comfortable to people." Schoeder's prediction is that "We're probably going to be the last country to break that barrier".