The traditional gender gap is losing ground as a key factor in politics to intragender gaps that have emerged among Republican and Democratic voters along the fault lines of masculinity and femininity.
This recent development involves differences within each gender, as opposed to the gender gap between men and women, which came to the forefront in the aftermath of the 1980 election between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter,
Men — specifically white men — who see themselves as extremely masculine tend to support President Trump, while those who are weaker in their assessment of their masculinity — or in how they think about masculinity — are far less likely to support Trump. The gap between the two is just as significant if not more significant than the gender gap.
A similar, but more complex spread has emerged among women, although it is smaller and lends itself to competing interpretations.
While the invocation of intragender gaps instead of a “gender gap” may sound like an intellectual exercise relevant only in ivory towers, the size of these gaps provides insight into the distinct Republican and Democratic policy agendas that have emerged in recent years.
The Republican Party, long the champion of traditional family values, now draws an even larger share of voters who believe in traditional gender roles, conventional masculinity and heterosexual family norms. And the party has gotten more conservative on these issues over the past few years.
For example, the percentage of Republicans who view “gay or lesbian relations” as “morally acceptable” fell this year to 35 percent, according to Gallup, from 56 percent in 2022.
A 2024 Pew Research Center report found that 53 percent of Republican-leaning men consider themselves to be highly masculine compared with 29 percent of Democratic-leaning men. The same survey found that a plurality of Republican-leaning men (45 percent) believe that Americans in general have a mostly negative view of “manly or masculine,” while a plurality of Democratic men believe Americans generally have a positive view of masculine or manly men (46 percent).
These intragender gaps may have begun to open up before Trump took center stage, although his dominant presence has prompted an intensification of — and reverence for — hypermasculinity among Republican voters, especially men.
The gender gap is a relatively simple comparison of the differences between men and women in their votes for Democrats or Republicans, or the different levels of support for such policy issues as military and welfare spending.
In the case of women in particular, the intragender gap is more subtle. But before going there, let me register a note of caution and frustration.
In comparison with scholarship on, say, voting or polarization, a disproportionate share of academic work that might provide objective analysis of gender and politics for a lay writer like me is riddled by advocacy in place of research. Fortunately, much of the work on hypermasculinity and femininity, while sometimes jargony, does not suffer these evidentiary weaknesses, with claims often backed up by polling and other data.
In their 2021 article “Beyond the Gender Gap: The Role of Gender Identity,” Elisabeth Gidengil and Dietlind Stolle, both longtime political scientists at McGill University in Montreal, sought to capture “a person’s gendered sense of self.”
In a survey, they asked white men and women “how feminine they feel and how masculine they feel, using seven-point scales.”
Having two dimensions, they wrote, was crucial
to identifying hypermasculine men: These men do not just exhibit an exaggerated form of masculinity; they fear feminization. In order to take account of the strength of their gender identity, respondents were also asked how important it was to them to feel feminine or masculine on a scale from 1 (not at all important) to 7 (very important).
What did they find?
In comparison to the 13.6-point gender gap in support for Trump, the intragender differences between hypermasculine men (81.9 percent favored Trump) and men with a “weak” sense of their masculinity (a little less than 30 percent backed Trump) was much larger at over 50 points.
Put another way, the intragender gap for men is nearly four times as large as the gender gap between men and women.
There is evidence that the growth of gender identity among men was a key factor in Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024.
In “Gendered Personalities and the Partisan Gender Gap,” a chapter in the book “Masculinity, Femininity, and American Political Behavior,” published three months before Trump’s 2016 presidential victory, Monika L. McDermott, a political scientist at Fordham, offered an
alternative theory for the perceived partisan “gender gap” (or sex gap) between men and women. The traditional explanation — that it is differences between men and women that drive this phenomenon — assumes that the presumed causal mechanisms, such as degree of compassion, split fairly cleanly along the lines of biological sex.
Gendered personalities demonstrate, however, that this assumption is out of place in today’s world. The analyses show that levels of both masculinity and femininity influence party affiliation, vote choice and ideology, regardless of an individual’s sex.
The more feminine an individual is, the more Democratic in both identification and voting, and the more liberal. The more masculine an individual is, the more Republican and conservative. These effects occur not only regardless of sex but also in place of them.
The argument receives support from a different vantage point from Melissa Deckman, the chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, and Erin Cassese, a political scientist at the University of Delaware.
They argue in their 2019 paper “Gendered Nationalism and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election: How Party, Class, and Beliefs about Masculinity Shaped Voting Behavior” that the 45 percent of American voters who agreed that the United States had become “too soft and feminine” were exhibiting “gendered nationalism” and provided Trump a key bloc of votes.
“Once we controlled for gendered beliefs,” Deckman and Cassese wrote, “specifically support for the notion that America had become too soft and feminine, gender differences in vote choice were not significant. Instead, holding more nationalist views helped to shape voters’ decisions in 2016.”
These findings, Eric Knowles, a professor of psychology at New York University, wrote by email,
make a great deal of sense. One thing that “highly masculine” men and “highly feminine” women have in common is their adherence to traditional American gender norms.
Since the G.O.P. has long been the party of culturally conservative values — including those around sex and gender — it makes sense that these men and women would be relatively likely to vote Republican.
Knowles argued that Republican consultants and strategists “are thinking specifically of sex and gender” as vital in fending off defeat in the midterm elections next month. “Republicans are banking on traditional gender values to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.”
He cited Ken Paxton, the Republican Senate candidate in Texas, who has portrayed James Talarico, his Democratic opponent, as “Tofu Talarico,” “Six-Gender Jimmy,” “James Tala-freak-o” and “Low-T Talarico.”
For men, the gender identity gap is relatively straightforward. For women, it’s complex and seemingly contradictory.
The women whom the Bem Sex Role Inventory test identified as high in femininity favored Democrats over Republicans. Conversely, women who self-identified as feeling highly feminine were more likely to support Trump and identify as Republican than those who ranked themselves lower on femininity.
But it turns out there is no contradiction. In fact, the two different methodologies identify two separate groups of women with little overlap.
White women who say they feel highly feminine, according to Gidengil and Stolle, are the “most closely linked to the traditional binary gender system.” It follows they would support traditional sex roles, marriage, heterosexuality, motherhood and religious observance — all values linked to the Republican Party.
The Bem Sex Role Inventory, in contrast, uses a series of questions to determine whether the subject is affectionate, compassionate, gentle, sympathetic, sensitive to the needs of others, warm and understanding. These traits are associated with the Democratic Party, and women high on these personality characteristics are more likely to support Democratic candidates.
I asked Stolle for help explaining the antithetical outcomes for women depending on the measurement test used.
“Our measure of hyperfemininity,” she replied,
is how feminine do you feel / how masculine do you feel? (it sometimes adds a measure of salience). This is essentially a subjective gender-identity measure.
A woman who places herself very high on femininity and very low on masculinity is saying something like: “I am distinctly feminine, and not masculine,” is part of how I understand myself. That can capture a more strongly differentiated or traditional gender identity, which could plausibly be associated with Trump voting.
The B.S.R.I. femininity items, by contrast, select characteristics that have been traditionally associated with being female and being male. For feminine traits, these are mostly communal personality traits and include being affectionate, compassionate, gentle, sympathetic, understanding, warm, sensitive to others, tender and so on. In contemporary politics, those traits could quite plausibly correlate with Democratic voting.
The expanding role of sex, masculinity and femininity in American politics has been a long time in the making.
“During the past three decades, Americans have come to view the parties increasingly in gendered terms of masculinity and femininity,” Nicholas J.G. Winter, a political scientist at the University of Virginia, wrote in 2010.
With considerable prescience, Winter argued that there were “interrelated developments in the late 1970s and early 1980s that we might expect to have mapped masculinity and femininity — already important for politics — onto the Republican and Democratic Parties, respectively.”
These include:
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“The polarization of party elites over the Equal Rights Amendment and other issues of women’s equality in the late 1970s.”
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“Republicans are thought to handle better such issues as defense, dealing with terrorism and controlling crime and drugs; these are precisely the sorts of issues that Americans associate with men or with masculine traits.”
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“The association of women with the Democratic Party is further reinforced by the fact that substantially more women have been elected as Democrats than as Republicans over the past several decades.”
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“The concept of leadership and the political realm itself both carry symbolically male connotations. Perhaps because of this, since the early republic presidential candidates and their campaigns have often emphasized their own masculine credentials and tried to undermine those of their opponents.”
The growing differences between the parties and their voters over masculinity, femininity and sex generally are sharpening the split between Democrats and Republicans over matters of life and death.
Amid rapid advances in technology, artificial intelligence and scientific research, the use of stem cells, the advents of state laws allowing assisted suicide and the disposition of embryos have all become partisan issues, following the path of abortion.
The basic question of whether differences between men and women are rooted in genetics or provoked by social expectations has also become intensely political. Pew Research reports that “majorities of Republicans point to biology as the main driver of differences between men and women,” while, on many issues, Democrats tend to believe these differences are “mostly based on the expectations society has for the two genders.”
As I finish this essay, it occurs to me that the larger issue is that partisanship has become a metastasizing cancer with no boundaries in sight. Soon there will be nothing that partisanship doesn’t distort.
Matthew Tobin contributed research to this article.
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