For those of you not in the united states, the USA is going through an election season at the moment. People are voting, and part of this means that other people are polling the voters to try to get a bunch of data regarding how different groups think and vote. However chances are that even if you are not in the USA but are in a country in which voting takes place this same kind of thing happens during your respective election season.

So the opinion data gets sliced up in a bunch of different ways, so they can say things like "A person who meets criteria X can be approached with mechanism Y to be pursuaded to vote our way". Lots of these groups make sense. Farmers care about water distribution but not so much about inner city programs. Students care about education funding but not so much about taxes. Some of them mark social trends, like younger people caring more about certain social programs than older people [on average].

One cut of the data though has always baffled me, but is always really obvious: gender [in this context used in a very broad and perhaps not entirely accurate way, casting everyone as 'male' and 'female']. Populations in general tend to be rather mixed in terms of male and female, outside of certain workplaces or marketing/media domains. Men tend to talk to women, and women tend to talk to men. People have sisters and brothers, mothers and fathers, etc etc. But the polls are always pretty starkly contrasted between who women vote for and who men vote for.

I find it rather interesting that there is such a difference. Setting aside the merits of the actual policies or things that get voted for, since that is fuel for flame wars, what is your opinion on how a divide of this kind can exist, and be so large?

Setting aside the merits of the actual policies or things that get voted for, since that is fuel for flame wars, what is your opinion on how a divide of this kind can exist, and be so large

Um, I think you just stopped the conversation before it could begin...

There have been many studies done on the different habits of males VS females .

IE: females are more likely to buy a vehicle with more cup holders, than males are

Interesting article:

[quote
http://www.slate.com..._than_men_.html

...
So did women move away from Reagan and his party in disgust? No. Rather, women’s emerging belief in their own political entitlement permitted them to stay right where they were. “Reagan struck a chord with men, so men moved in a more Republican direction while women stayed put,” Carroll says. And in the wake of Reagan, Carroll says, the parties remained more polarized, helping to harden men and women’s party identifications. Kaufmann, of the University of Maryland, has looked at long-term election study data from 1952 to 2004 and observed that men’s support for the Democratic party declined from the mid-’70s through the eight years of Reagan’s presidency, and has remained at that lower level, with small fluctuations, ever since. In contrast, she writes, women’s voting and party identifications look about the same as they did 50 years ago.
...
[/quote]

I probably misunderstood (not being a native English speaker), but what's so bad about dividing people into male/female? Sure it's very broad but if the difference in a poll is huge between the genders then it might be interesting.

Setting aside the merits of the actual policies or things that get voted for, since that is fuel for flame wars, what is your opinion on how a divide of this kind can exist, and be so large?

If you take away the policies, then you are left speculating about some intrinsic difference in the thought patterns of men and women - which at best leaves us in the bogus realm of phrenology.

The policies are what divides the majority male and female vote. Although why the male voter base continues to daydream about some half-remembered misogynist paradise, I cannot fathom...

[quote name='Oolala' timestamp='1350431741' post='4990935']
Setting aside the merits of the actual policies or things that get voted for, since that is fuel for flame wars, what is your opinion on how a divide of this kind can exist, and be so large?

If you take away the policies, then you are left speculating about some intrinsic difference in the thought patterns of men and women - which at best leaves us in the bogus realm of phrenology.

The policies are what divides the majority male and female vote. Although why the male voter base continues to daydream about some half-remembered misogynist paradise, I cannot fathom...
[/quote]Eh', maybe you're right. I was hoping to try to rule out the merits of the policies to avoid a conversation that became something in the form of "because {men/women} vote for stupid policies because they're stupid". The hope was to get people to focus more on how two populations that are so tightly connected can have such radically different priorities. If it really is just a matter of men dreaming about returning to a more patriachal time, then I agree that it's both simple and depressing.

It's real easy to just blame misogyny, but it's also a blunt tool that makes it really hard to continue the search if the issue is in fact something different due to the weight that a concept like that brings.

I probably misunderstood (not being a native English speaker), but what's so bad about dividing people into male/female? Sure it's very broad but if the difference in a poll is huge between the genders then it might be interesting.

I said it mostly to make sure the conversation didn't immediately fall into a discussion about the definition of gender. When you look at a population, it is pretty easy to divide the totality of people into roughly male and female. It is a lot more difficult to define these groups such that you don't leave anybody in the middle who doesn't nicely fit into one camp or the other. That is a seperate discussion though.

Interesting article:

[quote
http://www.slate.com..._than_men_.html

...
So did women move away from Reagan and his party in disgust? No. Rather, women’s emerging belief in their own political entitlement permitted them to stay right where they were. “Reagan struck a chord with men, so men moved in a more Republican direction while women stayed put,” Carroll says. And in the wake of Reagan, Carroll says, the parties remained more polarized, helping to harden men and women’s party identifications. Kaufmann, of the University of Maryland, has looked at long-term election study data from 1952 to 2004 and observed that men’s support for the Democratic party declined from the mid-’70s through the eight years of Reagan’s presidency, and has remained at that lower level, with small fluctuations, ever since. In contrast, she writes, women’s voting and party identifications look about the same as they did 50 years ago.
...

[/quote]Yes, I'd read through that article. It's interesting, but didn't seem to really illustrate how trends in one population managed to not be influenced or to influence the other population. For example, setting aside how reagan managed to appeal to men and not women, if you assume he did manage to appeal well to men, why then were men as a population not able to convey this enthusiasm to the women they know, and thus result in dragging the entire voting base. Likewise, why wasn't it the case that women were able to communicate their revulsion toward reagan to the men in their lives, and keep the voting population pinned where it started.

I think you're basically dealing with the broader topic of how men and women are different, and how there seems to be a gap between them.

The mormon is clearly at a disadvantage here.

The mormon is clearly at a disadvantage here.

I dunno. Apparently he has binders full of women. That's gotta help.