Men are the emotional ones more likely to get swept away in abstract ideas and symbolism, and women are simply more practical

16 Ways of Looking at a Female Voter By LINDA HIRSHMAN NYT: February 3, 2008

1. The Female Thing

what women needed wasn’t change; it was the whole truth and nothing but the truth: “Women are too smart, informed and astute at reading between the lines to back a presidential candidate who isn’t being straight with them — especially when she is a woman.” ...

“that we’re all voting for Obama because we want to date him, but they were showing a picture of Obama at the time, and I heard birds singing and bells ringing and missed it.” ...
“Do women Obama’s age look at him and see the popular boy who never talked to them in high school? ...

2. Mind the Gender Gap
men supported Reagan by 8 percentage points more than women did. Of course, more women supported the incumbent, President Jimmy Carter, than did men. And ever since, women have been more likely than men to favor Democrats. Both parties have tried a variety of strategies to open or close the gender gap: nominating a woman for vice president (Geraldine Ferraro), pretending there was no difference, collecting women into smaller subgroups (soccer moms, security moms), emphasizing feminist issues (equal opportunity, reproductive rights), emphasizing economics (health, welfare, child care)...

3. Race Matters—and Class, Too
RACE FACTORS into the gender gap in two important ways...

women as a group were less “white” than men were — and nonwhite women are more likely to vote Democratic than white women are. Second, nonwhite women are more likely to vote Democratic than nonwhite men (75 percent to 67 percent in 2004)...

5. Besides, Women Keep an Open Mind
the female moderates, it turned out, were actually more Democratic than Republican, but like most women, they voted only somewhat more for John Kerry than for George Bush in the 2004 presidential election. “They don’t see the political world as legible, especially in the media,” Blakley suggested. “That’s why they misidentify themselves, these words don’t make sense to them, they don’t have a value and a weight that makes sense to them, a narrative for politics.”

6. What About the Middle Ground?
WHEN IT comes to politics, it’s not just that women are ambivalent; it’s that, as a group, they are less interested than men are — not all women, naturally, but on average...

The only area where the gap narrows is in local politics, where women score close to men. Not surprisingly, less interest translates into less knowledge.

7. The Gap That Matters
THE PEW Research Center for the People and the Press has been following the gender divide in news consumption in great detail for years. This is what that gap looks like:

POLITICAL INTERESTS - MEN - WOMEN
International affairs- 63% - 37%
News about Washington- 59 - 41
Local government- 55 - 45

While men are more likely to follow international, national and local politics, women are more likely to attend to religion, health and entertainment, community, culture and the arts, crime and the weather. Men are significantly more likely than women to be regular consumers of “hard news” (32 percent of men versus 22 percent of women), and to turn to the Internet, radio news, talk radio, newspapers, political comedy shows and political talk shows. Women, by contrast, are more likely to get their news from the morning news broadcasts and network news programs. Although morning shows do offer news, they tend toward true crime, entertainment and lifestyle, and they regularly put a human-interest spin on government and foreign affairs.
Even if you factor in all the ways in which people gather news — women supposedly also get political information from the groups they join and from the people they know — and control for political affiliations, race and class, men still know more about politics than women do...

Of course, a quick glance at the numbers confirms that a lot of people, of both sexes, are hardly following the news at all. Most voters aren’t policy wonks. It may well be that there’s a base line of information that is “good enough” for citizenship, and knowing more makes little practical difference. But there is a strong correlation between knowledge and political participation. In most aspects of political action — candidacy, fund-raising, proselytizing, propagandizing — men predominate.

8. What Makes Women Tune Out
only one-third of news accounts cited any female sources at all.

9. Pride and Prejudice
NOT ONLY do fewer women turn to outlets with predominantly male sources for information, but studies also tie women to what scholars call the negative-media effect. Women will sometimes back a candidate because the media they distrust are backing his or her rival...

10. XX Marks the Spot
HISTORICALLY, THERE is no reason to believe that women, even Democratic women, will automatically support a female candidate... women, like men, have multiple commitments and connections, which pull their electoral loyalties in many directions. And because women’s lives are intimately connected with those of men, women are a little harder to organize...Seeing themselves as part of the political arena encourages women to get involved...

12. More Sense Than Sensibility

voters are more driven by their emotions than by any informed summing-up of their interests...As Popkin has noted, a party is really just shorthand for a series of issue positions — you love your party because it stands for what you stand for. So, if women as a group know less, does that mean they are more or less emotional when it comes to voting? ...

it’s that men are the emotional ones, “more likely to get swept away in abstract ideas and symbolism, ” and that women are simply more practical. “They may not frame their decisions in terms of policy or party positions — not use legislative jargon — but they know what’s in their family’s interest,” she said...
She characterizes the female agenda as focusing mainly on “family, education, things that affect the household budget, health care.” Which today, she adds, also means war and peace. Similarly, Page Gardner told me that for her single-women constituents, it’s “all about economic opportunity — health, education for their children, wages, energy costs.” ...

13. It Does Take a Village

“Women naturally think of working with other women in network form, talking to each other about what’s important.” ... The campaign has also focused on the issues they thought would attract women’s support, starting with events around Equal Pay Day last spring. “The polling confirms what common sense will tell you,” Lewis said. “Economics, health care, education, their own retirement.”

14. Or a Cybervillage

THE OBAMA campaign has also identified a woman-to-woman strategy...Certainly Obama’s oratorical skill is a vivid reminder of the role of rhetoric to inspire political commitment, and he has done extremely well with young women voters, those most likely to be wired...

15. The Political Is Personal

No less a figure than Carol Gilligan, the feminist scholar who first posited that women express themselves in a different voice, reminded me that she never said a woman’s tendency to value relational connections excluded the self. “Coming forward with their own voices is key to citizenship in a democratic republic,” Gilligan told me. “Women are using their emotional intelligence and relational intelligence to read the biographies to figure out if this is a trustworthy person.”
And when women do come forward, they alter the political landscape. Scott Keeter, of the Pew organization, and Michael Delli Carpini, of the University of Pennsylvania, found that as knowledge increases, “both single and married men become slightly more conservative, while married women move slightly in the liberal direction and single women become quite a bit more liberal.” These changes lead to a clear gender and marriage gap on domestic-welfare issues. As Keeter and Carpini concluded in their study: “A fully informed citizenry would have collective consequences, resulting in a public-opinion environment that is more ideologically diverse and slightly more liberal.”...

16. By the Numbers
SINCE 1964, more women have voted than men have, and since 1980, they have voted at higher percentages: 54 percent of voters in the 2004 presidential election were female. If women care less about politics than men do, why do they bother? In one recent study, women said that they vote to protect their interest. Whereas men said they vote because they enjoy politics. To a campaign strategist, the female vote — if you can get it — must look like the Chinese market does to an entrepreneur. Only a modest percentage has to want your product, and you’ll succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
Linda Hirshman is the author of “Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World.” This is her first article for the magazine.