Last week, Pew released a poll asking voters if they knew four facts about the GOP presidential primary candidates. What really shocked me was the stark contrast between men and women:
Across the board, regardless of political affiliation, women seem to know far less than men. Unfortunately, the crosstabs aren’t available, but this is really puzzling. If I understand the results correctly, they are demographically weighted–Pew didn’t ask a bunch of young, non-Tea Party women, and older Tea Party men and then fail to adjust for this. Given that four different questions were asked, and the pattern holds across all four, I don’t think this can be a fluke.
Very weird. Discuss.
mikethemadbiologist
Women pay even less attention to the news than men do. This is not complicated to interpret. The better questions are why and how do we fix this?
I interpreted this as only applying to the Republican/Leaning Republican voters, not voters as a whole. Note this sentence in the story: “Just 26% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters under 40 correctly answered at least three of the four questions, compared with 62% of those 65 and older.” You can see clearly here that they’re only talking about R/LR.
And in this case, it makes perfect sense that women who lean Republican are less informed. Women who pay attention run like hell from the Republican party.
Women are more intelligent than men. They know what is not worth knowing.
I’m goin’ with “Min” on this one.
The only way to be a woman and vote Republican is to a. not pay attention, b. lie to yourself, or c. be a religious funamentalist. Otherwise you are aware that they want to go back to a system where you’re chattel.
I hypothesize that Republicans lean more towards traditional gender roles, and traditional gender roles for women involve staying out of “masculine” affairs, like politics, and voting the same as their husbands, resulting in a female electorate which votes Republican buts is significantly less informed than its male counterpart.
It also seems like women, on the whole, pay less attention to politics (likely because it’s a big, macho wank-fest most of the time), but I can provide only anecdotal evidence for that.