The Gender Gap: A Manifestation of Women’s Dissatisfaction with the American Polity?

This chapter discusses that the rise of the so-called gender gap in the 1980s represented such a "broken contract" for women in America, since the growth of a distinctive women's perspective on political issues arose, essentially, because the polity failed to respond to several basic needs facing different types of women in modern society. Several sets of social forces are generally credited with producing the gender gap in ideology and partisanship. Once again, the enduring nature of the gender gap indicates that it taps some basic value and role differences between men and women in American society. The contention that feminism and/or self-interest explain at least part of the widening gender gap is based on the assumption that social change led to a shift in the attitudes of certain types of women. The gender gap in voting and partisan affiliation seemingly reflected important changes in the way men and women viewed the central issues in American politics.