In his article for the Financial Times, Stephen Bush investigates the roots and reasons why across the democratic world, women are increasingly choosing to support progressive parties.
Stephen Bush / Financial Times
In 1911, Winston Churchill, then a Liberal minister, warned the prime minister, HH Asquith, that if the government pursued votes for women, it risked dying “like Sisera, at a woman’s hand”. One reason why the Liberals were divided over the issue is that some feared that extending the vote to women on the same basis then enjoyed by men would enfranchise women without economic ties but who benefited from inheritances, boosting the electoral power of the Conservatives and hurting that of the Liberals.
In the present day, the economic position of the average British woman is significantly better than it was when her forebears were first given the vote. She is more likely to have gone to university, more likely to have a seat in Parliament, more likely to be a judge, to sit on the board of a FTSE 100 company, or to be a billionaire. She lives longer and is more likely to own property. But on the electoral battlefield, she has gone from a winner to a loser.
Throughout the 20th century, the average British woman was more likely than the average British man to have backed the victorious Conservatives. In the 21st century, the traditional gender gap has gone into reverse: by the time of the 2019 election, the average British woman was more likely to have backed Labour than the average man. The gender gap was 13 points.
The story of British women’s changing electoral behaviour is pretty typical. For most of the 20th century, women were more likely than men to back parties of the right across the democratic world. Today, however, it is the other way round: female voters have moved, in the words of Beyoncé, to the left, to the left.
What’s driving the switch? I don’t think that what we are seeing here is a story of the right failing to win over women. That Mitt Romney and Theresa May underperformed among women as much as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson did is a pretty good sign that the gap can’t be credibly explained through the personalities of individual candidates either.
Although there is a clear liberal-conservative gender divide in voting behaviour, there is not as clear a divide on an issue-by-issue basis. Although female voters in the UK and US are more likely to have liberal positions on transgender rights, they are also more authoritarian on crime. In Israel, Israeli women are more likely to agree with a number of policy positions close to the right’s heart, but they are also more likely to support stronger welfare states and be liberal on a swath of social issues.
You can read the full article here.