Women Are Losing the Gender Gap -- How Republican Politics Contribute

How have American women fared in their struggle with gender equality? Not very well according to the latest figures from the World Economic Forum and WalletHub financial website. In fact, things are getting worse instead of better.

The gender gap in 21st century America has only expanded. In 2020, the U.S. failed to place in the top 10 – or even the top 50 – of the World Economic Forum’s ranking of 153 countries based on gender equality. In fact, the U.S. dropped to 53rd position from its previous rank of 51st.

WEC’s Global Gender Gap Index found the U.S. currently ranks 70th globally when it comes to the gender gap in health and survival. And, the U.S. currently ranks 86th globally when it comes to the gender gap in political empowerment.

Women have outnumbered men on college campuses since 1988. They have earned at least one-third of law degrees since 1980 and accounted for one-third of medical school students by 1990. Yet, they have not moved up to positions of prominence and power in America at anywhere near the rate that should have followed.

(National Center for Education Statistics, “Fast Facts: Enrollment,” available at https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=98)

Susan Ehrlich Martin and Nancy Jurik, “Women Entering the Legal Profession:
Change and Resistance.” 2007.)

The workplace provides even more evidence of the gender gap issue. Despite their advances toward social equality, women are disproportionately underrepresented in leadership positions. Women make up more than 50 percent of the population, but constitute only around 24 percent of legislators and 25 percent of Fortune 500 board seats.

(Adam McCann. “2020’s Best & Worst States for Women’s Equality.”

WalletHub. August 24, 2020.)

This year, women also face inequality when it comes to unemployment during the COVID-19 pandemic. Women have been laid off at a greater rate than men, and are also getting re-employed more slowly. In addition, the share of the workforce that is female is now at its lowest point since 2008.

One reason for this greater effect on women is that the virus is significantly increasing the burden of unpaid care, which is disproportionately carried by women.

Women are also more vulnerable to the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic because they are more likely then men to work in service industries, which have been hit especially hard in recent months. With so many schools and daycares closed, many of the additional childcare responsibilities have also fallen to women.

Females lose skills when they leave the workforce, either because of job loss or to care for children, which results in lower pay when they return, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.

To determine where women receive the most equal treatment, WalletHub compared the 50 states across 17 key indicators of gender equality. The data set ranged from the gap between female and male executives to the disparity in unemployment rates for women and men.

The study found the best state in America for gender equality is Hawaii, followed by Maine and Nevada in second and third place, respectively. The worst state for women in terms of equality is Utah.

Bad News For Lady Buckeyes

Ohio ranked Number 42 out of 50, making it the ninth worst state in America in terms of gender equality. The only place Ohio excelled was in having one of the top smallest educational attainment gaps among advanced degree holders; however, the state was among the bottom rung for having the largest political representation gap in the nation – 47^th.

Political Representation Gap

In 2018, a Pew Research Center study found that 61 percent of Americans felt positive about more women running for office in 2018. The number of people voicing support for women in politics was higher than in previous Pew surveys.

Rachel Bernhard, Postdoctoral Prize Fellow in Politics at Nuffield College at the University of Oxford and political scientist who studies how female candidates are portrayed and evaluated, referred to a recent study (May 2019 by the American Sociological Association) on the persistent gender gap in politics over the past 40 years. Bernhard says …

“One thing we really see in this study is that women are doing great – but mostly in offices where people assume they are qualified due to their gender, like school board races … When the stereotype is that women aren’t qualified – = mostly in executive offices like mayors – they do worse than male candidates, even though they have more government experience.”

(Karen Nikos-Rose. “Is there (still) a gender gap in politics?

University of California Education. January 07, 2020.)

GOP Gender Gap

While women had a record year in the 2018 midterm elections, bringing their total numbers in Congress to 127, much of the data is still grim. For every woman across both chambers, there are roughly three men. And the split along party lines is even starker. Thirty-eight percent of Democratic lawmakers are currently women, while just 8 percent of Republicans are.

(Li Zhou. “How to close the massive gender gap in Congress.”

Vox. August 14, 2019.)

A study from Georgetown University professor Michele Swers found that liberal women in Congress sponsored far more bills related to women’s health than their male counterparts. Female lawmakers, backed, on average, 10.6 bills related to the subject, roughly double the number supported by their male colleagues.

According to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are more than twice as likely as Republicans and those who lean Republican to say there are too few women in high political offices (79% vs. 33%). And while 64% of Democrats say gender discrimination is a major reason why women are underrepresented in these positions, only 30% of Republicans agree.

(Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Ruth Igielnik, and Kim Parker. “Women and Leadership 2018.” Pew Research Center. September 20, 2018.)

Catalist, a progressive data company, reported college-educated white women swung Democratic by 10 points from 2016 to 2018, and non-college-educated white women swung Democratic by seven points. A recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed that both groups of white women favored a generic Democrat over Trump by margins of 33 and six points, respectively. The pool of women willing to embrace the Republican brand is shrinking.

Diversity has never been a strength of the modern-day GOP. The decline of Republican women in elective office, the vast majority of whom are white, also mirrors broader shifts in voting patterns. The Republicans’ white woman problem is rooted in male tribalism. Much of the Republican primary electorate that remains is so pro-Trump that they don’t trust women candidates to be sufficiently aligned with the president.

Julie Kohler, a fellow in residence at the National Women’s Law Center and a senior advisor at the Democracy Alliance, says …

“The Republican base that has coalesced around Trump has been increasingly characterized by “hostile sexism” – antagonistic attitudes toward women that stem from a belief that women want to control men. Hostility toward women was a major factor predicting support for Trump in 2016 – the first year it played a large and significant role in a presidential election-- among Republican men and women alike …

“Hostile sexism is not limited to Republicans. But its prominence within the Trump-aligned GOP base suggests that Republican women candidates will have a heavy lift for the foreseeable future.”

(Julie Kohler. “The Republican Party’s White Women Problem.” The Nation. August 28, 2019.)

Kohler continues:

“The GOP has invested so heavily in white-male identity politics that the policies that have become its Trump-era signatures – family separation, draconian abortion bans – are widely unpopular with the American public and profoundly alienating to many of the white independent and moderate women who have historically voted Republican. Recent data from the Voter Study Group revealed that one in five Republicans has “economically left” policy preferences, with particular concern for Social Security and Medicare. Two-thirds of these voters are women.”

The gender realignment of American politics is the biggest change in party affiliation since the movement by loyal Democratic voters to the GOP in the “solid South,” in the final decades of the twentieth century.

Trump can't seem to resist attacking powerful, successful Democratic women and hindering full equality of all women. The 2020 election will tell how American women respond to the current widening of the gender gap.

In 2016, 63% of women who were eligible to vote said they cast ballots in the presidential election, compared with 59% of men. The Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University reports that in every presidential election since 1980, the proportion of female adults who voted has exceeded the proportion of made adults who voted. Ladies certainly have the electoral power to make sweeping changes.