Is GOP at war with women? 4 points to keep in mind on the gender gap

To hear all the buzz, Republicans are at war with women and “hemorrhaging the women’s vote.” A reality check is certainly in order. Here are four points Republicans should keep in mind as they look to bridge the gender gap and chart a winning path to November.

2. Understand what the gender gap is actually saying

The term “gender gap” entered public discourse in 1980. Journalists, pundits, and pollsters combed through polling data and noticed a difference in the percentage of women and men voting for Ronald Reagan. Activists were quick to frame the gender gap as a response to feminism. Women, supposedly angry that the Republicans reversed their stance on the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and abortion, expressed their concerns at the ballot box.

It’s a nice argument from anecdote, but the story line doesn’t fit the facts. As feminist scholar Jane Mansbridge documented, “Despite intuitive convictions to the contrary, the gender gap was largely traceable to gender-related differences in attitudes toward violence and war, while ‘the ERA and possibly abortion’ had essentially no role in the matter.”

The public may believe that abortion is the issue that most separates male and female voters, but numbers show otherwise. As Gallup summarized, “Over the past three decades, men and women have consistently held similar views about the extent to which abortion should be legal.”

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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