The Gender Gap and the Women’s Vote in 2012: Setting the Record Straight

Media coverage this election season has featured some confusing mislabeling of the gender gap and women’s voting patterns. To clarify:

The Gender Gap in voting is the difference between the percentages of women and men who support a given candidate, generally the leading or winning candidate. It is the gap between the genders, not within a gender. Even if women and men favor the same candidate, they may do so by different margins, resulting in a gender gap.

[%Women for Leading Candidate] – [%Men for Leading Candidate] = Gender Gap

The Women's Vote describes the behavior of women as a voting bloc or the divisions among women voters for or against a given candidate. It is the percentage-point advantage that one candidate has over the other among women voters – that is, the difference in support for the major party candidates among women voters.

[%Women for Obama] – [%Women for Romney] = Women's Vote

Gender Gap Facts:

• There has been a gender gap in every presidential election since 1980. In the 2008 election, women were 7 percentage points more likely than men to vote for Barack Obama (56% of women vs. 49% of men), according to the exit poll conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International.
• In the 2012 election, a gender gap is apparent in support of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, both nationwide and in battleground states. See CAWP’s Women’s Vote Watch 2012 for the most up-to-date numbers.

Women’s Voting Facts:

• Women vote in higher numbers than men and have done so in every election since 1964. In 2008, 9.7 million more women than men voted.
• Women have voted at higher rates than men since 1980. In 2008, 60.4% of eligible female adults went to the polls, compared to 55.7% of eligible male adults.
• More women than men register to vote. Some 78.1 million women were registered to vote in 2008, compared to 68.2 million men.
• Women are late deciders and make up a higher number of undecided and swing voters than men. Women are 55% of undecided likely voters in the latest Battleground Tracking Poll conducted by Lake Snell Perry & Associates and the Tarrance Group (October 15-18).

For a more detailed analysis, see “What is the Gender Gap? And What Does it Mean in 2012?”