ABSTRACT
Beginning in the early 1980s, students of American politics began to observe a pronounced gender gap in American voting patterns, in which women voted for Democratic candidates more frequently than did men. 1 As intriguing as the electoral gender gap may be, there is a far more long-standing gender gap that has received far less attention. This is the policy-preference gender gap. Simply put, women and men take different positions on, and have different levels of intensity about, a host of important political and policy issues. Because there is ample evidence that the preference gap explains much of the electoral gender gap, the preference gap is worthy of more exploration than it has received.
