Flipping voter gender gap could be decisive
SOME years ago, while clearing out our shared office, my roommate offered me a book entitled Dataviz.
Short for ‘data visualisation’, its message was that a good visualisation can communicate information and ideas more powerfully than any other form of communication.
And it’s true, as the illustrative graph will hopefully demonstrate.
Widely used ever since the 2019 General Election, it’s immediately striking, almost self-explanatory, and has become quite famous in its own right.
Using a single red (Labour) or blue (Conservative) column for each of the 21 General Elections from 1945 to 2019, it shows whether women were more likely than men to have voted Conservative: blue, pointing down – or less likely: red pointing up – and by what percentage.
It has become one of the most reproduced summary graphs since the 2019 Election, because it is both so visually, and politically, striking.
All but one of the first 19 election columns are blue, pointing down – women more likely to have voted Conservative by varying percentages up to a mighty 17% in the early 1950s.
The sole exception was 2010, the first of the recent ‘hung Parliament’ elections, when men and women were equally likely to have voted Conservative, so no column at all.
It had become a truism: that, certainly in Britain, women were at least marginally more Conservative or right-wing than men in their voting behaviour.
Until suddenly, in both the 2017 and 2019 General Elections, they weren’t – in each case being a sizeable 12% LESS likely to have voted Conservative than men.
Some unknowable proportion of what was immediately tagged our Flipping Gender Gap was undoubtedly attributable to women’s consistently greater enthusiasm for remaining in the EU, but those unprecedented 2019 gender gap figures are still worth detailing.
Conservative: 47% of men, 42% of women; Labour: 29% of men, 37% of women – representing a massive 18% Conservative lead over Labour amongst men, and just a 5% lead amongst women. Which begs the obvious question of whether we’ll see something comparable this time, and, if so, to what degree?
Or was it, say, Brexit in those two elections that produced a kind of two-off aberration?
Either way, these ‘gender gap’ statistics will be among the most anticipated and intensively studied, as commentators prepare their voting forecasts.
Indeed, they already have been, the commonest immediate reaction from those who study these things, particularly following the 2019 election, being that “at last” UK women voters were catching up.
For the stats have shown that for years now many/most other established democracies – the US outstandingly, but also the Scandinavians, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Canada, even Italy – had seen the development of a modern-day gender gap, with women more likely to vote for left-leaning parties than men, while our gender gap showed the reverse.
No longer, then, did the UK seem to be bucking the global trend. As in these other democracies, as more women entered higher education and paid work, some at least became more socially and economically liberal and supportive of gender equality, pushing them to the left of men in their party choices.
Even just typing that ‘UK women voters’ label, though, I’m conscious of risking over-simplification. And indeed, it obscures significant and unsurprising differences across age cohorts.
Younger women are considerably more likely to support Labour and less likely to support the Conservatives than younger men, but this modern gender gap lessens and eventually disappears among older voters.
So how will all this affect what happens in this year’s General Election?
The estimable UK Women’s Budget Group commissioned a YouGov poll last autumn which reflected and updated some of the above findings – starting with almost a law of UK electoral politics: women take their time to decide.
Asked for their voting intentions, 18% of respondents hadn’t, with no election in the immediate offing, made up their minds: 11% of men and a full 25% of women.
Those that had decided split very similarly between the major parties: Men – 20% Conservative, 31%
Labour, 7% Lib Dem; Women – 17%, 31%, 8%.
The big difference came with the then Don’t Knows: just 11% of the men, but one in every four women. So, if they hadn’t then decided, perhaps they won’t vote? By no means: 13% of males were ‘would not voters’, and just 3% of females. Probably not surprisingly, their policy priorities differ somewhat too. NHS and healthcare is highest ranked by all, but that was 48% of men and 64% of women.
The economy was “most important” for 44% of men, but only 28% of women, and the reverse was the case for ‘Environment and climate change’ and ‘Education and schools’ – the latter ranked “most important” by 18% of women but just 9% of men. And, to quote the admirable
Forrest Gump: that’s all I have to say about that – for the time being.
‘Gender gap’ statistics will be among the most anticipated and intensively studied, as commentators start making their voting forecasts.