Men are From Mars, Women Are From Sweden

Tyler Cowen discusses the contributions of feminist economics:

Gender differences in analyzing the effects of policy. Sweden, no matter what you think of it in absolute terms, is a better deal for women than for men. Overall women are more risk-averse and less interested in accumulating large sums of wealth. The Soviet Union was less bad for women than for men. Many governmental health care systems are better geared toward the needs of women (e.g., easy access to pre-natal care) than for men, who require massive medical innovation to fix their heart attacks. And so on. These points don't receive enough attention.

I think this always gets less attention than it should when people set about to talk about voting behavior. The "gender gap" in US politics tends to be treated as either driven by stylistic attribubes (Republicans nominate manly men) or else by "women's issues" construed in a very narrow way (abortion, sex discrimination law). It's worth noting that this sort of gender gap -- women vote further left than men -- seems to be pretty universal across advanced democracies and appears to me to be tied to very broad issues. I doubt anyone thinks of this explicitly "as a woman, I both face more objective exposure to risk and a higher level of risk aversion, therefore, I'll back the Democrats" but I think it's almost certainly an important driver of voting behavior anyway.

Comments

Your point would seem more compelling if (a) we couldn't explain the votes of non-white women by their non-whiteness, and (b) white women didn't vote principally for Republicans. (NB: I am pulling my sense of the information from a recollection of a GFR article. The pro-Republican gap might just be for Presidential elections, but I believe it's longstanding.)

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | June 6, 2007 9:58 AM

In the UK, women have persistently voted for the Conservatives at higher rates than men since WW2 (the exception being Blair for a while -- current polling IIRC suggests that this has now reverted to the previous trend).

Those crazy risk-loving British chicks!

(Of course, women tend to be less unionised than men).

Posted by otto | June 6, 2007 10:07 AM

Not in the UK. Women are more likely to vote Conservative than men (due possibly to the presence of Margaret Thatcher?)

Posted by ajay | June 6, 2007 10:08 AM

Good post.

Posted by Korha | June 6, 2007 10:13 AM

In the UK, women have voted solidly conservative since the Tories gave them the vote. Ironically, they started to drift left in the years since thatcher.

Posted by Chris | June 6, 2007 10:19 AM

Overall women are more risk-averse and less interested in accumulating large sums of wealth.

The brilliant Tyler Cowen, Economist to the Masses, strikes again!

Has it occurred to the Professor that what he perceives as risk aversion among women is in fact a different payoff matrix for different genders? "Risk aversion" means that women are, as a group, likely to discount a lottery with an expected value outcome that carries greater variance, even when EV is the same for two lotteries. If that's the case, then it must be because women are somehow different, fundamentally, in how they perceive risk.

Much more likely is simply that women face a different lottery than do men, one with a lower expected value. Women are simply far less likely to accumulate large sums of wealth whatever their attitude to risk. That different payoff structure is the result of sexism across generations, etc.

Tyler Cowen makes a great little game for himself applying economics brilliantly to the outcomes he sees in the world. Except that he's always wrong.

And men require "massive medical innovation" to cure heart disease? Maybe a little preventive medicine would do the trick, something provided by the healthcare system of, I don't know, Canada? Somehow, when you're a libertarian, the problem always seems to fit the solution. Amazing how that works.

Posted by Marshall | June 6, 2007 10:31 AM

Really? My impression was that most continental European countries also tended to have the reverse (i.e. British) pattern, because the left there was made up of labor parties with a traditional base of male unionized industrial workers. (I haven't been able to corroborate this with two minutes of The Google, though, so I could be wrong).

Posted by Jose Peterson | June 6, 2007 10:39 AM

Married white women vote more Republican than Democratic, although still more Democratic than married white men. Single white women are overwhelmingly Democratic voters. In 2004 Kerry beat Bush among single white women by 64-36% - almost exactly the reverse of the voting pattern among single white men. There is no group of voters more divided by gender than single white people.

But most single white women don't vote. There is an enormous potential pool of Democratic voters if single white women could be motivated to go to the polls.

Posted by Bloix | June 6, 2007 10:42 AM

Married women with children in the suburbs, tend to be very easily frightened, and, once frightened, are almost guaranteed to vote for the more authoritarian figure in an election.

For the most part, both economic and the psychology of political affiliation is far too complicated for the mind of Tyler Cowan to grasp or explain.

Posted by Bruce Wilder | June 6, 2007 10:49 AM

In countries with an aggressive, militant Left women are more conservative than men, but the US has no significant Left. (Sorry, Matt, but you, DeLong, Krugman, Drum -- et. al. ad nauseum -- are centrists.)

I mistrust what Cowen said about health care -- "heart attacks" vs. "prenatal care" looks like apples and oranges to me. I suppose that for someone who feels the need to have a dialogue with the Right, people like Cowen and Douthat are the best of the worst (even though I still think that Douthat's grumble about his failure to take advantage of his Ivy education was incredibly cheesy.)

When I need to have a dialogue with the Right, I come here or go to DeLong. Everything is relative.

Posted by John Emerson | June 6, 2007 10:53 AM

Women may be more risk-adverse than men, but in certain instances - disease and crime are perfect examples - men face much higher actual risks.

Posted by Peter | June 6, 2007 10:56 AM

I had no idea it was so complex. I thought it was just that so many men are pigheaded dicks.

Posted by DCBob | June 6, 2007 11:12 AM

No one has mentioned professions. Although I lack statistics at my fingertips, I think it is quite true that women go into social service type professions at a much higher rate than men (teaching, nursing, health care, etc.) and men go into more agressive business jobs (sales etc.) than women.

In general, the professions that are majority female (teaching, nursing) tend to be much more Democratic-leaning than those professions that are predominently male (sales, farming, trucking, etc.)

It might be a chicken and egg effect, who knows. But once someone has chosen to go into a profession like teaching they are much more likely to vote Democratic. That we do know.

Posted by Kent | June 6, 2007 11:36 AM

Peter, could it be that women's risk aversion means that they are less likely to be victimized, while men take more risks and thus suffer for it, when it comes to being a victim of crime and falling victim to disease?

Posted by Constantine | June 6, 2007 11:38 AM

Look at any demographic split - men/women, rich/poor, white/black, majority/minority, parents/children, teachers/students, physicians/patients, business/labor, corporations/consumers, police/civilians, prosecutors/defendents, and so on. In every case, the left party favors the underdog, and the right party favors the topdog. The left is the party of pity, or sympathy for the underdog. The right is the party of pride, or sympathy for the topdog.

Posted by Gary Sugar | June 6, 2007 11:49 AM

Much more likely is simply that women face a different lottery than do men, one with a lower expected value. Women are simply far less likely to accumulate large sums of wealth whatever their attitude to risk. That different payoff structure is the result of sexism across generations, etc.

This looks solid to me -- that the sort of low odds/high payoff routes to great wealth that people perceive unregulated capitalism as facilitating, people also percieve (pretty accurately) as being much less likely for women.

Posted by LizardBreath | June 6, 2007 12:08 PM

Much more likely is simply that women face a different lottery than do men, one with a lower expected value. Women are simply far less likely to accumulate large sums of wealth whatever their attitude to risk. That different payoff structure is the result of sexism across generations, etc.

Its not just a different payoff structure, it's a different risk structure as well.

As a white male, I think I'm in a much better position to be a loser than a woman. I would be far less vulnerable if I was out on the street. It's easier for me to find grunt work in a huge number of manual labor type professions than for women. I'm reasonably big and healthy and I could, if necessary, get by on the streets, living out of a car, or whatever than it is for a much smaller and more vulnerable woman.

In short, when men "risk it all" they are really risking less than a woman would be in the same situation.

Posted by Kent | June 6, 2007 12:33 PM

As numerous others have already pointed out, Cowen is being his usual asinine self, using his knowledge of economic theory to speculate sententiously on issues he doesn't understand, basing his argument on easily disproven false assumptions, and basking in the warm glow of adulation from his Randroid fan base.

My assumption is that he cries himself to sleep every night wishing he'd written Freakonomics.

Posted by LaFollette Progressive | June 6, 2007 12:35 PM

Single women are a huge Democratic constituency, because they typically get money from the government from government jobs, welfare programs, or Social Security. Women tended to vote more Republican than men up until the Great Society introduced more welfare and government jobs.

Posted by Steve Sailer | June 6, 2007 12:36 PM

If Jose Peterson (among others) is right, it's not clear that women strongly prefer the Left to the Right. It seems to me that there are any number of theories that might explain facts to which the theories need not be tethered. I think we should go with the following: most politicians are male, Left males have substantially larger penises than Right males, women prefer large-penised men (for some crazy theoretical sociobiology reason) and know the difference between Left and Right from experience; women therefore choose Left politicians.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | June 6, 2007 12:52 PM

Oh, right, Tim, because women are sex- and penis-obsessed single minded automatons. Thanks for that unnecessary contribution to the discourse, humorous in intent as it may have been.

Posted by Marshall | June 6, 2007 1:01 PM

I apologize for harm to a valuable discussion in which we sort out why something that isn't happening is happening. Because gawd knows that sort of moronic game never harmed anyone. Next up: WMD in Iraq and what we should do about Hussein's weapons that don't exist.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | June 6, 2007 1:08 PM

Peter, could it be that women's risk aversion means that they are less likely to be victimized, while men take more risks and thus suffer for it, when it comes to being a victim of crime and falling victim to disease?

Crime, possibly, but I don't see any connection WRT disease.

Posted by Peter | June 6, 2007 1:28 PM

Peter, one who is risk averse about one's health is going to go in to the doctor for regular checkups and focus on eating right and exercising. That risk aversion (or at least risk-consciousness) is likely to have health payoffs, insulating the person from the consequences of many untreated, undetected diseases.

Posted by Constnatine | June 6, 2007 1:52 PM

Re: Many governmental health care systems are better geared toward the needs of women (e.g., easy access to pre-natal care) than for men, who require massive medical innovation to fix their heart attacks.

That's apples to oranges, since you are comparing the health care needs of two very different age groups across genders. What would be better to say is that many European health systems are more oriented to serving the healthcare needs of young people (whose needs, even when serious, tend to involve acute rather than chronic problems) and preganncy falls into this category. Older women (who may need hip replacemnts and the like) also get short shift in these systems.

Re: The Soviet Union was less bad for women than for men.

Saying that the Soviet Union was better for women than for men is an utter howler. Soviet Communism was patriarchy on steroids.

Posted by Jonf | June 6, 2007 2:04 PM

Another factor adding weight to your theory is that single women vote especially strongly Democratic. Single women (especially single mothers) are potentially even more exposed to risk than are married women, who enjoy the benefits of being attached to a (less-at-risk) man.

Posted by beckya57 | June 6, 2007 2:15 PM

It is true that in much of Continental Europe, women until fairly recently voted more "right wing" (usually Christian Democratic) than men (who were more likely to vote for Social Democratic or even Communist parties). However, that tendency has pretty much disappeared and to some extent even reversed in recent years, largely thanks to the weakening of the two institutions that kept women on the "Right" and men on the "Left" respectively: the Church (churchgoers were disproportionately female) and the trade union (the large industrial unions in particular were disproportionately male).

It should be noted that even when they were disproportionately on the "Right," European women were not insensitive to the role of government in providing economic security, because the Christian Democratic parties strongly supported the welfare state. In that sense, they were not "right wing" at all in the Reagan or Thatcher sense.

Posted by David T | June 6, 2007 2:34 PM

Umm, why has nobody pointed out that babies also have fathers? Pre-natal care helps the women and child. The fact that Cowen thinks it a women's issue pretty much tells you how inherently sexist he is.

Posted by Rob | June 6, 2007 3:03 PM

when you wrote stylistic "attribubes" didn't you mean to write "attriboobs"?

Posted by Robert Waldmann | June 6, 2007 8:03 PM

"Soviet Communism was patriarchy on steroids."

And Czarism wasn't patriarchal? At least in the early Soviet years the Communists had honest pretensions to being the party of gender-equality.

Posted by Benquo | June 6, 2007 10:50 PM

You know, after all this heterodox back and forth its nice to be reminded why "thinking like an economist" makes one a prick.

Posted by david | June 6, 2007 11:52 PM