Are Women Predisposed to be Liberal?

I venture this post with a certain amount of trepidation, but to quote Stacey McCain quoting Arthur Koestler "

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up."

The conservative woman writer and pundit S.E. Cupp has written a significant article on the problem of "the gender gap", the tendency for women to vote more liberally, that is to say, in favor of big government solutions as opposed to private enterprise solutions.  Some excepts.

As a conservative woman, it pains me to admit: The gender gap is real. As the Pew Research Center recently pointed out, Democrats have enjoyed more support from women than men for 30 years, and the majority of women have voted for Democratic Presidents since 1992.  ...I put the blame squarely on the shoulders of women. As everyone knows, we’re the smarter sex, so why shouldn’t we be held accountable for the way we vote? And if most women are voting for Democrats, they must have their reasons...

What I will argue is that women are biologically and historically predisposed to be economically liberal, that their hormonal and slightly different than male mental patterns make them more apt to think that communitarian economies are better than individualistic and competitive economics.

The truly compelling — and frightening — finding from the Pew poll on the gender gap isn’t about abortion or contraception. It’s that women prefer big government solutions. And this is where feminism meets its match.

The percentage of women who favor bigger government providing more services outpaced men by 9 points in 2011, and has since at least 2000, with widest gap in 2004 at 12 points.

Women, it seems, are falling for the left’s “we’ll take care of you” economic paternalism, the insistence that women need the state, or wealthy taxpayers, to rescue them from a life of oppression, squalor and servitude.

Women are the sex most biologically responsible for child care.  If you doubt for a minute that it is not a biological  function, do a survey comparing men's and women's chests. Sex, determined by a sex chromosome in humans, is developed through an imbalance in hormones between the sexes.

Men's external form, and to a large extent their masculine behavior is determined by a dominance of testosterone, the male hormone.  High concentrations are associated with developed musculature, and other male sexual characteristics, and certain behavioral differences, including rage, dominance behaviors, and competitive success.

Women's external form, is determined by the dominance of estrogen.  Estrogen is known to inhibit risky and potentially anti-social behavior.


For humans, women have been raising the children at a home, or home camp for at least a few hundred thousand years, at least since the evolution of modern humans, producing a  communitarian experience. Meanwhile men, at least in the hunter gatherer stage, which constitutes a majority of our evolution, have been on the front line of humans interactions with the world beyond the home.  They hunted, fished, made war and peace, scouted and prepared the family or tribe to move if necessary (and it was, a lot). 

These differing circumstances, and indeed, different evolutionary pressures mean that the two sexes do not necessarily perceive the world in entirely the same way.  While men tend to see the world terms of going out and getting what it takes to survive, women tend to look for the comfort within the tribe, helping, and being helped.  When the tribe becomes the federal government, women are more likely to see value in the comfort offered by the government. Or as S.E. Cupp puts it:

Women, it seems, are falling for the left’s “we’ll take care of you” economic paternalism, the insistence that women need the state, or wealthy taxpayers, to rescue them from a life of oppression, squalor and servitude.

These differences are likely a combination of both genetically determined average differences in innate behavior, and learned behavior.  The answer the to question of whether sex differences are learned or instinctive is almost always "Yes!"  Mind you, these are only generalizations, not rules.  Individuals differ on almost every trait and behavior.  While the sexes may differ in mean, they overlap to a very large extent.

We can only hope that women will see the light and perceive that an expanded welfare state is a net drag on everyone's lifestyle:

I don’t know where women went wrong. Republican economic policies of self-reliance should be right up their alley. Instead, it appears as if they really just want to be taken care of. Is this the legacy of feminism? If so, Republicans — and women — are really in trouble.

 I think a lot of the problem is innate. And only education and reasoning can overcome the gap.

Thanks to Wombat-Socho at The Other McCain for getting his Rule 5 (Lobo Town) list together on such short notice after vacation.