Social Networks and Autonomy
Three female researchers at the University of Toronto and McGill University examined how women acquire political information and its impact on voting patterns. They theorized that women with a diverse social network tend to vote with more of a liberal preference.
Using data from the 2000 Canadian Election Study, the researchers found evidence to support two hypotheses:
First, the wider the range of women known, the more likely women are to vote for the Left, and second, the wider the range of higher-status women known, the more likely married women are to vote for the Left.They also discovered another gender-specific characteristic of female voters:
[S]ocially communicated cues may be particularly consequential for women because they tend to know less about the parties and their platforms than men do. Accordingly, casual acquaintances can be an important source of new information for women....[W]omen require sufficient autonomy to express their gender-related interests in their choice of party....
[M]arried women's political autonomy can be enhanced if their social networks include a range of women who do enjoy such autonomy.
What Women Know...and Don't Know
New information for women is critical, as the widely-accepted belief that women know less about current events than men is regrettably true.
An April 2007 study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press shows that the average woman lags behind the average man as much as 12% in correctly answering a news quiz covering recent headlines. (See how you fare by taking the quiz at Pew News IQ Quiz .)
