A panel of prominent political scientists presented their research at the panel “One Hundred Years of Women Voting: The Nineteenth Amendment’s Legacy and Current Implications” on Monday, February 24, 2020. The experts discussed the political behavior of women leading up to and since the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. Jenna Bednar, professor of political science at the University of Michigan and research faculty at the Center for Political Studies, moderated the discussion. The event was part of the U-M Department of Political Science Rubin Speaker Series and U-M Suffrage 2020 event series.
Mara Ostfeld, Christina Wolbrecht, Angela Ocampo, and Corrine McConnaughy
Popular views of women voters over the past 100 years, and what the evidence actually tells us about them
In her newly-released book, A Century of Votes for Women: American Elections Since Suffrage, Christina Wolbrecht, professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame, presents evidence to challenge some of the long-standing beliefs about the way women vote and engage in politics.
In the first several decades of women’s suffrage in the U.S., understanding of women’s political behavior was based on rhetoric, not based on data, said Wolbrecht. Data does show that married women often voted as their husbands did. Political experts interpreted this correlation as evidence of political disinterest on the part of women, but this conclusion was not based on data. Following the belief that women didn’t form independent political opinions, Gallup used quota controlled sampling that undersampled women. The American Voter describes women as following their husband’s wishes rather than voting according to their own beliefs.
Wolbrecht argues that these unsupported conclusions still matter today because these books are still read today. She emphasizes that although married women often vote as their husbands do, we don’t know who is influencing whom.
Political Pioneers: Women of Color as Candidates and Elected Officials
Angela X. Ocampo, a research fellow in the department of political science and the Center for Political Studies, presented current research assessing the representation of women of color as political candidates and elected officials. “Women don’t get access to vote until their racial group does,” said Ocampo, noting that women of color were still denied the right to vote or hold elected office on the basis of race after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Most research on women of color in elected office focuses on the federal level, but Ocampo, along with her research collaborator, Ana Oaxaca, is studying representation in local government. Their research shows that women are most likely to be elected from places that are protected by the Voting Rights Act. Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which significantly weakened the Voting Rights Act, Ocampo sought to understand how the representation of women of color was affected at the local level.
To answer this, she’s analyzing data on city councils in the 300 largest U.S. cities to isolate the factors that are associated with a high proportion of women of color council members. Women of color are underrepresented in city councils, making up only 10% of council members. Ocampo finds that the more Democratic a locality is, the higher the proportion of women of color and minority council members. Proxies of political power are also important. When there is a higher proportion of more minority voters in a city, the proportion of women of color and minority council members also increases.
Ocampo concludes that gains have been made in representation, but parity is yet to be achieved. Representation of women of color and minorities depends on political pressures and the voting power of minority voters. She cautions that upward trends in the representation of women of color and minorities will likely be derailed by efforts to suppress minority votes.
Hidden Politics: Women’s Organizing and the Shape of American Democracy
Corrine McConnaughy is an Associate Professor of Political Science at George Washington University. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Michigan and worked closely with many of the faculty during that time.
McConnaughy said that to find examples of women doing political work in the period before suffrage, we must look beyond formal suffrage organizations. Whether political organizing was taking place within suffrage organizations or other organizations, historians find common themes in women’s political activity in the period before the nineteenth amendment. Women were doing crucial service work in their communities and creating innovative ways to gain power. Importantly, women were doing political work as women, but not unified by womanhood.
The suffrage movement faced challenges because women were not seen as a promising voting bloc, McConnaughy said. Because so many people believed women would vote as their husbands did, no party stood to gain an advantage by allowing women to vote. For this reason, bi-partisan support was essential to gaining franchise. The ability to form coalitions with other groups also proved essential. Suffragists were well-organized and good at raising money, which made them attractive coalition partners.
Why Women Oppose Policies that Support Women
The final speaker was Mara Ostfeld, is a Faculty Associate with the Center for Political Studies and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. She presented research she is conducting with two graduate students, Lauren Hahn and Sara Morell.
Ostfeld framed their question: “In the 100 years that women have had access to voting rights, and in the context of women constituting the majority of voters in America, why hasn’t there been more progress for policies to provide women with equitable opportunities?” She cited statistics to illustrate the issue: 20% of women say that reports of the gender pay gap are overblown; one-third of women say that women who complain about sexual harassment create more problems than they solve; another third believe that at least half of the time that women demand equality, they’re actually seeking special favors.
Family socialization is the key reason for these beliefs, according to Ostfeld. “Unlike other marginalized groups, women are not raised in women-majority environments,” she noted.
Ostfeld, Morell, and Hahn conducted a survey to gauge how women believe their family members would react to taking pro-women positions, to assess how women perceive the social costs of their beliefs within their families. The survey also asked about the polices the women supported. Ostfeld found clear evidence that women who believed they will be stigmatized for embracing policies to promote gender equality are far less likely to support those policies. Even among women respondents who recognized the gendered disparities motivating the policies, they were still less likely to support policies promoting gender equality if they felt their family members would stigmatize them for doing so.
In almost half of two-parent households in the United States, both parents work full-time. Yet when a baby is born, it is still new moms who take the most time off work. On average, new mothers take 11 weeks off work while new dads take just one week, according to a 2016 survey carried out by the Pew Research Center.
In part, that is because many new fathers in the U.S. don’t have access to paid paternity leave. Paid maternity leave is rare, too: in fact, the U.S. is the only developed nation that does not provide a national paid family leave program to new parents.
Only three states (California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island) have their own paid parental leave policies, as do some companies. In Silicon Valley, tech giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter offer gender-neutral paid parental leave policies that can be taken by new moms, dads, and adoptive parents. But that’s not the norm. According to the Society for Human Resource Management’s 2016 Employee Benefits research report, only 18 percent of U.S. organizations offer paid maternity leave, 12 percent provide paid paternity leave, and 17 percent have a paid parental leave plan that can be taken by either parent.
More commonly, birth moms with short-term disability insurance receive some pay for six to eight weeks following childbirth. If new moms want to take more time, or if dads, adoptive parents, or moms who didn’t give birth themselves want time off to bond with a new baby, those eligible under the Family and Medical Leave Act can take unpaid leave for up to 12 weeks.
But even if new fathers had access to parental leave programs, they might not take advantage of them. A survey by Deloitte found that 36 percent of men would not take advantage of their paid parental leave benefits because they worried it might jeopardize their position at work. And parental leave programs that offer more benefits to moms than to dads only reinforce the stereotype of the female caregiver and male breadwinner.
The authors came to the study with mixed expectations for how gender role ideologies would influence support for parental leave. On the one hand, because parental leave programs give working mothers time at home after the birth of a child, they can help new moms balance work and motherhood—a struggle that is at the heart of traditional gender role ideology.
On the other hand, women must be employed to access maternity leave benefits, and the central goal of these policies is for women to return to their careers—facts that could conflict with conservative gender role attitudes.
Expanding parental leave to new fathers also has the potential to make men more involved in childcare, women more engaged in their careers, and workplaces friendlier for parents of all kinds. Thus, those holding more traditional views might be less supportive of parental leave policies that can be applied to male recipients.
This study assessed gender role ideology by asking participants how strongly they agreed or disagreed with four statements related to women’s roles in the home and as mothers:
A woman’s place is in the home, not in the office or shop.
A mother who carries out her full family responsibilities doesn’t have time for outside employment.
The employment of mothers leads to more juvenile delinquency.
Women are much happier if they stay at home and take care of their children.
In general, respondents rejected the view that a woman’s employment is detrimental to her perceived duty at home—but there were clear variations in responses. Largely in line with expectations, demographic factors such as being female, having a university education, and being employed were associated with more liberal views; those who are married, have children, and are older had more conservative views.
Next, the researchers investigated whether citizens are more or less generous toward parental leave takers based upon their gender role attitudes as well as the gender stereotypicality of the leave takers.
The researchers presented survey participants with fictional stories that described the situation of several potential parental leave takers: a married female, a single female, a married male, a single male. In each case, respondents were told the amount of leave to which the new parent is entitled in their country, and were asked how much he or she thinks the recipient should receive in monetary benefits.
Across all respondents, there was strong support for more stereotypical leave takers, with respondents opting to give the female parents in the fictional situations about $175 more in benefits than the male parents. The marital status of the leave taker was also important, with married leave takers receiving about $70 more than single parents—despite the fact that one might assume that single parents would be more in need of state support. There thus was a general tendency to enforce gender norms in terms of who benefits from family leave policies.
This figure shows the relationship between gender role attitudes (plotted on the x axis), and cash support for parental leave policy (show on the y-axis). Across all respondents in the U.S., UK and Canada, support is strongest for more stereotypical leave takers (married females), and least generous for single men.
That said, the researchers found that those who hold more conservative gender role attitudes in the UK and U.S. tended to be less generous toward leave takers overall. Among US survey participants in particular, those with the most conservative gender role attitudes reported giving the fictional recipients about $124 less than respondents who held more progressive attitudes. This was after controlling for the characteristics of the fictional leave takers, and also for the ideological orientation of the respondent with respect to government benefits.
Moreover, those with more traditional gender norms tended to be particularly punitive to non-stereotypical leave takers. (This is clear in the figure above.) The most conservative respondents reported giving single male recipients about $330 less than they would give to married women leave takers. In contrast, for respondents with more progressive gender role ideology, the difference in benefits between married women and single men was about $230.
These results highlight a good deal of complexity in the structure of support for parental leave policy. It is not necessarily the case that women are more supportive of parental leave policy than men, for instance. Although women are more likely to reject traditional gender roles, women who are married with children tend to believe more strongly in the gendered division of parenthood, and thus, are less willing to extend parental leave benefits to men. In the U.S., and also Canada and the UK, support for parental leave policy reflects a set of complex and often counteracting ideas about gender, parenting, and work.
*Race, Gender, and the Welfare State survey (RGWS)
As of October, the latest national polls, predicted that the 2016 Election results will reflect the largest gender gap in vote choice in modern U.S. history. Today, according to NPR, “An average of three recent national polls shows that women prefer Clinton by roughly 13 points, while men prefer Trump by 12, totaling a 25-point gap.” If these polls prove true, the 2016 results would indicate a much larger gender gap than what was observed in 2012, where women overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney.
2012 vote by gender based on national exit poll conducted by Edison Media Research.
University of Texas at Austin Professor Tasha Philpot argues that what really may be driving this gap to even greater depths, is race. For instance, here’s the same data from the 2012 Election, broken down by gender and race.
2012 vote by gender and race based on national exit poll conducted by Edison Media Research.
Often overlooked in the discussion of the gender gap, race figures prominently into many American’s political identities.
2016 Gender Gap in Party Identification
2016 Gender Gap in Party Identification.
Philpot recently participated in the panel “What We Know So Far About the 2016 Elections” at the University of Michigan’s Center for Political Studies. In her talk, “Race and the Gender Gap in the 2016 Election,” Philpot outlined the potential sources for the gender gap and emphasized the role that race is playing in widening the gap.
Using data from the ANES 2016 Pilot Study, Philpot compared opinions from white and black men and women on several issues such as government spending, inequality and discrimination, and evaluations of the economy. While there were noticeable differences strictly between men and women, the real story became clear when Philpot sorted the results by gender and race. Small gender gaps exist among both whites and blacks, but the most remarkable difference of opinions on all issues is between black women and white men.
SPENDING ON HEALTH CARE AND DEFENSE
2016 Gender Gap in Spending on Healthcare and Defense.
Perceived Gender Discrimination
2016 Gender Gap in Perceived Discrimination Based on Gender
Evaluations of the Economy
2016 Gender Gap in Economic Evaluations.
On most issues, black women and white men fall on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Philpot concludes that it’s an oversimplification to consider the gender gap as merely a gap between men and women, when, in reality, the observed gender gap is largest between white men and black women.
What We Know So Far About the 2016 Elections, was held on October 5, 2016 at the Center for Political Studies, University of Michigan. The panel also included the following talks:
Stuart Soroka: Read, Seen or Heard: A Text-Analytic Approach to Campaign Dynamics Nicholas Valentino: The Underappreciated Role of Sexism in the 2016 Presidential Race Michael Traugott: Pre-Election Polls in the 2016 Campaign
