Women--even those who are as politically over-informed are you could possibly desire-- are not inclined to listen to people who seem to mainly want to make individious generalizations about how stupid we are based on 17 year old studies.

And if 50% of men voted GOP in house races in 2006, isn't that prima facie evidence that it is men who are the irrational voters?

It’s probably not the most prudent plan to do dueling paragraphs with a Straussian-trained scholar like me, and this is starting to sound like one of those endless things in the back of the New York Review of Books, but, to paraphrase Pat Moynihan, you can have your own opinion, but you cannot have your own word count. My article is 2,150 words long -- 641 words were spent describing my chats with the D.C.-area stay-at-home moms Schmitt so decries. The remaining 1,509 words, or roughly 70 percent of the article, were spent on setting up the problem of women’s non-instrumental voting (481 words), describing the numerous and well-established studies of women’s political interest and knowledge (650 words), and drawing the implications of both anecdote and research on Hilary’s campaign strategy (468 words).

Riveting, just riveting.

For House races, not necessarily. It's the old dilemma: hate the Congress, love your Congressman.

Katherine: Hirschman is referencing studies that have been released more recently as well.

You're a "Straussian-trained scholar"? Say no more.

So, Tyrone, you won't investigate an argument because of the background of the writer? Isn't that intellectually dishonest? I don't have a wide enough background on the empirical matters to say whether Hirschman is correct or not, whether her analysis is ultimatley sound. But saying "oh, she's been trained as a Straussian" doesn't cut it as a counterargument. Also: what do you interpret that as meaning her being a Straussian trained scholar? What does that mean to you?

*Ann* *Althouse* is criticizing someone for describing women as shallow and uninformed?

(pause)

Did we already go through all the obvious jokes this should inspire?

Referencing, but not quoting from or linking to, so I don't know what they say.

Hirshman's "Outlook" piece may be the least coherent, worst-reasoned piece I've ever seen in such a publication. But then, how about the following sentence, from the current apologia:

"More than 50 percent of men, but not even half of women, could say whether a communist could run for president..."

Pitiful. "More than 50 percent of men" could be 51 percent. "Not even half of women" could be 49. I'm not implying or suggesting that the measured difference is that slight (I have no idea). I'm commenting on the comically awful writing.

Let's assume that Hirshman is right--that women score less well, on average, than men on some well-made test of political knowledge. What does that have to do with Clinton's campaign? Dick Morris, a Hillary-hater, has said, on Fox, that HRC will bring out 7-9 million otherwise-non-voting single women. Is that right? I have no idea. But this is Morris, a Hillary-hater, not the straw men (Penn and Begala) Hirshman knocks down at the start of her piece. If Morris is right, what difference does it make if somewhat fewer of these women (as compared to men) know that a commie can run for president? Again: If you want to see compleat incoherence, go ahead--just read Hirshman's piece.

I assumend TAP readers were capable of finding scholarly publications either on the web or online without further assistance. But for a quick link to a recent work summarizing and citing the earlier work, go to:

http://www.civiced.org/pdfs/research/GenderAndPolitical.pdf

In brief reply, let me note that Hirshman’s response deals largely with the one element of the article that I did not question: that studies of political knowledge/awareness show women scoring somewhat lower. For the record, here are the three (3) paragraphs from the article that offer data in support of her claim that women are politically ignorant:

The Center for Civic Education recently reported that American women are less likely than men to discuss politics, contribute to campaigns, contact public officials or join a political organization.
About 42 percent of men told University of Michigan researchers last year that "they are ’very interested’ in government and public affairs, compared with 34 percent of women."
Worse, women consistently score 10 to 20 percentage points lower than men on studies of political knowledge, regardless of their education or income level. Studies dating to 1997 have shown that fewer women than men can name their senator, or know one First Amendment right. They even know less about the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade than men do.
As a 2006 study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press put it, American adults live in "A World of His and Hers." Two million more men than women read either Time or Newsweek; more men listen to radio news and talk radio, read the paper and get news online. Only broadcast television news plays to more women than men, and a lot of that is TV news magazines and morning shows. Not only do fewer women read the newspaper, but almost half the women surveyed said they "sometimes do not follow international news because of excessive coverage of wars and violence."

I did not and do not challenge these three paragraphs. We can stipulate that this is the data. As Paul Waldman noted in a comment on my original post, some but not all of this difference in knowledge may be explained by women’s greater willingness to answer "Don’t Know," rather than guess on the answer to a question. In any event, citing bibliographical references to the one brief section of her article I did not challenge is hardly a rebuttal to any of my points about the other 29 paragraphs.
The rest of Hirshman’s response could be summed up as saying that women -- whether because they’re irrational, ignorant, or because they defer to men -- vote in contradiction to their basic political instincts. Which might be true if women voted the same way as men. But they don’t! In the past decade, they have consistently been ten or twelve points more likely than men to vote for Democrats than men, at the presidential level, and the magnitudes in this year’s Senate races were similar. To make the claim that women irrationally vote against their own beliefs, Hirshman has to deny the entire existence of the 10-12 point gender gap, which she achieves only by claiming that the gap hasn’t been "decisive" in elections such as Bush-Gore, which is irrelevant. Existence of the gender gap is one of several points (OK, not "sixteen") on which I disagreed substantively with Hirshman, and to which her response does not speak.
Finally, Hirshman references Anna Greenberg's fine essay, "Beyond the Gender Gap," so I should note that Greenberg does not make the claim that women vote irrationally, but rather argues for looking at the demographic structure of the women's vote, and trends among unmarried vs. married women, young vs. older women, etc., and, basically, to speak to women like grown-up responsible voters: "offer a clear commonsense economic vision while reframing the 'values' debate to address the concrete concerns women have about raising their families in a society that often seems to be operating in a different reality than their own."

My favorite stat: "More than 50 percent of men, but not even half of women..."

But Mark, you challenged a Straussian on word counts.

A STRAUSSIAN!!!!!!!

Really, it would be best to just give up now. What would Pat Moynihan say?

So, Tyrone, you won't investigate an argument because of the background of the writer?

I thought the line was pompous, and am more interested in Hirshman's arguments than in throat-clearing about her credentials. But I did continue reading the post, if that's what you're asking.

Most journals aren't available for free for people not tied to a school. I presume if they were you would bother linking directly to them instead of a lit review on an Indonesian study.

Sorry, I meant: politics is hard. Lets go shopping!

More seriously, it's interesting that you take from these studies that women, in particular, are underinformed, and it's best resolved by admitting we have a problem and telling women to stop being so dumb and uninformed. You're not simply setting forward the numbers, you're waving at them vaguely to support a thesis I don't even really understand.

I did especially like "More than 50 percent of men, but not even half of women..."; it made me feel like I was reading Bjorn Lomborg. What are the damn numbers, what's the margin of error? Maybe it's a really big gap, but when someone generalizes about statistics it's helpful to actually show your work instead of getting these cherry-picked-statements about what "studies show."

So, Mark, we now agree that my copious research is correct (the Don't Know argument, btw, had you bothered to look, has been definitively refuted by Luskin and Bullock, whom I cite for that point in my post. You know you can learn a lot from reading your adversary's writing before you respond). So all the noise about how I should not have talked to real women in the DC area is behind us. Great.
We are left with whether the ineffective gender gap is evidence of women's rationality. Remember, the gender gap alone is meaningless in terms of political power. If 90% of men and 70% of women vote Republican, there's a huge gender gap. But who cares? You can create a huge gender gap just by convincing a lot of men to embrace conservative views and then vote their beliefs.
Here's the question: only 51% of those liberal, pacific, tolerant gender gaping women, who Greenberg describes, voted for Kerry. Even after six years of extreme provocation, only 55% voted Democratic in the national House races. Either a substantial percentage of women are lying to Greenberg, which would be interesting to find out, or a significant number of them are not voting their supposed commitments when the moment comes. If you want to win elections, it pays to figure out why this is happening. I took a first cut at analyzing why. Nothing I have read in the response to my article so far even tries to answer this question.

Finally, as to the gotcha guys, what I found is just not going to go away, no matter how hard you try.
I try not to bore my readers to death, by summarizing the wealth of underlying data, but, since you seem incapable of looking it up yourselves, from "What Americans Know," here goes:
most important: what the parties' ideologies are:
Men 63% correct, women 48% correct;
whether a communist can run for President: men 59% correct, women 41% correct; describe one Fifth Amendment right: men 56% correct, women 45% correct; describe one First amendment right: men 42% correct, women 32% correct; can states prohibit abortion:
men 75% correct, women, 71% correct.
Let's see: on the one hand, Delli Carpini and Keeter's professional, endlessly reproduced results; on the other hand DICK MORRIS?

My fervent wish for Delli Carpini and Keeter: Next time they produce professional, endlessly reproduced results, I hope their results end up with someone who can coherently explain and apply them.

I assumend TAP readers were capable of finding scholarly publications either on the web or online without further assistance...

since you seem incapable of looking it up yourselves...

Such a nasty and condescending tone in defense of a poorly written and condescending article is sure to bring around those gossipy, emotional, willfully ignorant women to Hirshman's side.

"Remember, the gender gap alone is meaningless in terms of political power"

No, it's not.

oboy. I can always tell when people are at the end of their argument when they start attacking my tone or writing style. To paraphrase Rebecca West, "I only know that criticizing my tone is what people always do when I say anything to distinguish myself from a doormat." What next, hairstyle?

Yes, your research reflects the current consensus on one particular point about political knowledge. I never challenged those 3 paragraphs, and I acknowledged them. My issue is with the use you made of that data in combination with all sorts of more dubious assertions, to draw broad conclusions about Hillary Clinton and the state of feminism, and, as you put it in the first paragraph of your reply, that the "opt-out revolution applies to politics."

If the research is all so decisive about your larger points, then why did you bother with the Wednesday Group interviews at all? Why did you describe the interviews as your "test" of your "theory" about a question that you "had never seen answered"???

And as to your question,"[why did] only 51% of those liberal, pacific, tolerant gender gaping women, who Greenberg describes, vote for Kerry?," -- you've got to be kidding. No one said that ALL women have liberal views. The gender difference on issues ranges about 3-15 points, depending on the issue. In 2004, for example, in the Annenberg poll the on marriage gap and gender gap, cited by Greenberg, the gender gap on the Iraq war was 9 points, the gap on "right track/wrong track" -- the key election-predictor question -- was 11. And the gender gap in the actual Kerry vote was 10 points, just about the same.

And in addition to the mix of issues that are salient in an election and changes in the demographics of the women's vote, there is the entirely relevant question of whether people thought Kerry was the right kind of person be president. ("Biography") I thought so, you apparently thought so, but a lot of women and a whole lot of men evidently thought otherwise.

Of course you are right that a 20% gender gap can be totally irrelevant to election outcomes, as in a case where 90% of men and 70% of women vote for one party, but that's irrelevant to your point. Your point is that these ditzy women don't vote in line with their rational issue preferences, whereas men do. To make that point, you have to explain away the entire existence of the gender gap, which you can't do. The gender gap in voting and the gender gaps on issues are not all that different.

Finally, on a small point, in your original reply, you quote me as accusing you of having "little evidence" for the claim about differences in political knowledge. That phrase came from elsewhere in my post; I said that, like Penn and Carville, you had "little evidence" that women would be more likely to support Clinton than a man with similar positions. It had nothing to do with the evidence of differences in political knowledge, the three paragraphs in your piece which are not in dispute.

I wouldn't call them ditzy, but I agree with Linda that a large number of women more often than not today do not follow the news as closely as men and tend to lean on them (the men in their lives) for political opinions.

Your point is that these ditzy women don't vote in line with their rational issue preferences, whereas men do.

I would not call them ditzy, but would definitely agree with Linda that very often "women don't vote with their rational issue preferences" like men do.

Who put in the word "ditzy", or is that what you automatically label those who don't always bargain effectively for themselves?

Like it or not, I bet Linda is more correct in "reality" about the behavior and actions of this sizable number of women. Denial may be more easy, but doesn't help much.

FYI - When your argument has been demolished then "attacking" your tone is the only thing left for the tardy commentators to do.

How dare you Linda to do some actual research, and coming to conclusions based on data! And on top of this, you interviewed 5 women. Sheesh. What next.

Schmitt and Althouse have done exhaustive research, looked at data, and interviewed......wait. Nevermind.

Better to just ass-bite someone that has the chutzpah
to declare what they believe based on available data.

What next, hairstyle?

Well, no offense, but would you bring this up if you didn't already know that people criticize your hairstyle? Your analysis may be valid, but your tone is really nasty, and if you were a man, I would think you were a misogynist, so it doesn't help that it looks like you get your hair styled at a men's barbershop.

Even after six years of extreme provocation, only 55% voted Democratic in the national House races.

Or maybe the other 45% just don't agree with you, Linda. That's why we hold the elections, instead of assuming how one group or another "should" feel and adding it up that way.

I can't trace the Pew report you refer to in the Post piece.

In fact, googling "a world of his and hers" pulls up only one item apart from yours (and references to yours).

Spooky...

Perhaps that was your phrase, and doesn't appear in the Pew report - helpful. Even so, just scanning the list of reports for 06, nothing stood out as gender-comparative.

Linda, on one more point -- you say: "the Don't Know argument, btw, had you bothered to look, has been definitively refuted by Luskin and Bullock, whom I cite for that point in my post. You know you can learn a lot from reading your adversary's writing before you respond"

This refers to the idea suggested by Paul Waldman that women are more likely to answer "don't know" on questions of political knowledge than to guess. In your reply, you did not make any reference to this question, but cited, ""Measuring Political Knowledge," Robert C. Luskin University of Texas at Austin,John G. Bullock, Stanford University August 3, 2006 [Rebutting Mondak and Anderson’s efforts to blunt the bad news.]"

So because of my own dedication to actual facts, I made my way through this paper. Lo and behold, just a single mention of gender in the entire paper! It is mostly a methodological, highly mathematical effort to determine whether attempting to correct for don't-know answers by assigning them randomly -- as if the people were guessing -- creates more problems than it solves. They conclude that it does -- the math is beyond me, maybe not you. Here is their one mention of gender:

"Women do seem to say DK more frequently than men, a tendency sometimes cited as an
argument against treating DKs as incorrect (Mondak xxxx, Mondak and Anderson 2004). But
other scorings entail their own error. Indeed, Mondak’s remedy amounts to a deliberate
injection of random error. The question, at the end of the day, is whether the conventional
scoring of DKs as incorrect works better or worse than the alternatives. On the evidence here,
the answer is clear."

This is not a "definitive rebuttal" in any sense -- they concede the point. All they are saying is that any attempt to correct for women's greater likelihood to say "Don't Know" will create additional problems.

I hadn't previously questioned your three paragraphs on the data, but I'm beginning to think that you have simply strip-mined the academic literature for evidence that proves your point, rather than evaluated it seriously.

Hey Linda, can you enlighten me as to why you chose to interview primarily stay-at-home mothers and non-working married women for your anecdotal research while the scholarly research you cite makes no such distinction between working and non-working women?

Mark
we're even boring me. Have a nice weekend.

I'll take a crack at something different--what's wrong with women reading "real simple?" I read real simple, am a stay at home mom, and read 20 political blogs a day, give heavily in both time and money to political causes, and am heavily to the left in a seriously yellow dog democratic family. My husband reads *no* magazines, gets most of his political information from me or from NPR.

I think hirschman's work speaks, or rather wheezes, for itself and the other commentors and Mark Schmitt have abely taken it down. But I'd like to just say one thing--why is the article framed as the failure of *Feminism*? Feminism a) is not a revolution that happened in any definitive sense, say, like the revolution of 1905 or the orange revolution. B) Feminism didn't insist that women were more rational than men (and sure didn't argue that men were rational actors at all) or that liberation would entail reading US world news or the economist. Feminism also didn't promise us a rose garden where every woman could both be a high powered high paid lawyer *and* have kids and time to enjoy them and also good government. The most feminism did for us was break down some of the barriers to education and employment, it didn't solve the worlds problems, get every woman a lover or every man one, for that matter (this is to answer the inevitable "if feminism is so great why are so many women/men still unhappy? but see a) again if you are confused.)

My point here, and I do have one, is that the number of high powered, could be paid a lot, highly educated at home women is a) quite small, b) extremely time bound. YOu hit up a bunch of upper class women who are home with their kids you are going to find them talking about their kids. That's true for a few years. Its not true over the course of their lives. If you'd met up with their husbands and interviewed them while they were at a sports game I think they'd have talked about sports--would that mean they weren't political actors? Try talking to those women when they get on the school boards, when they run for local office, when their kids are off in college and you will end up with a very different set of anecdotal stories. And they won't be reading "real simple" at that point because it won't be their demographic.

aimai

aimai:

Excellent post! I would like to add that I could never see the crisis that Hirshman does because my POV regarding gender issues includes data from the hard sciences, in addition to the softer sciences. For example - take our ever increasing life span. I believe that a female born today could be looking at a life span of 90-100 years. So what's the problem if she takes 10-15 years out of her life to raise kids and focus on her family, as opposed to the larger world? According to Hirshman, that simply negates anything else she could accomplish with the 40+ years she would have to turn her attention outward! I never believed that women could "have it all" concurrently...but I think we'll be living long enough to accomplish quite a bit in different areas of our lives.

Very interesting exchange. Thanks to Linda and Mark for taking the time to think this through.

oboy. I can always tell when people are at the end of their argument when they start attacking my tone or writing style.

Interestingly, those of us following this set of exchanges can tell when you've reached the end of your argument when you begin to accuse your opponents of disliking your tone.

We're not disagreeing with you because we cannot handle a shrill tone; we're disagreeing with you because you make false, unsubstantiated assertions.

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