Why are women voters moving to the left?

Why are women voters moving to the left?

Read time: 4 minutes

Stephen Bush

 4 HOURS AGO

Why are women voters moving to the left?

Across the democratic world, women are increasingly choosing to support progressive parties

One reason why traditional social democratic parties have struggled is that while they are winning over some graduates, they are still doing very poorly among rich graduates .

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 United Kingdom and United States 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.

A big part of the difference here is “salience”, which is the polite way of saying how much of a flying one voters can be persuaded to give about a particular issue. Polled on the issues, Israeli women are more rightwing on security issues than men, but that they go on to vote for parties of the left suggest they care less. In the UK, although there was no statistically significant difference between how men and women voted in the Brexit referendum, men were more likely to prioritise the outcome in the elections that followed. As a result, Labour did worse among pro-Leave men than it did among pro-Leave women in 2019. But that the “gender gap” is actually a “salience gap” doesn’t get us any closer to understanding why it exists in the first place.

I think the big change here is actually an economic one. Many more men are living into retirement age — generally, but not always, an age bracket that parties of the left struggle to make inroads with. Many more women — 57 per cent of students in the UK are female, and just 43 per cent are male — are entering higher education, and, across the democratic world, graduates are more likely to vote for parties of the left than the right.

Further heightening the gender gap, while women with a degree are more likely to receive an individual boost to their earnings compared to women without one, male graduates are still likely to earn more. And one reason why traditional social democratic parties have struggled is that while they are winning over some graduates, they are still doing very poorly among rich graduates, or at least not doing well enough to compensate for the loss of votes in areas that were once dominated by industrial production.

While the average woman might be more likely than previously to have a high-paying job or sit on a company board, she is also still more likely to be fielding questions about childcare and her children’s report cards — which would also account for those differences in salience. The new gender gap is not a strange countervailing force to the new economic positions of men and women; it is a consequence of them. Churchill’s fears that a large group of voters without workplace ties would cause difficulties for liberal parties proved right — but not necessarily in the way he might have expected.

stephen.bush@ft.com