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Rethinking Women's Interests: An Inductive and Intersectional Approach to Defining Women's Policy Priorities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2021

Tevfik Murat Yildirim Open the ORCID record for Tevfik Murat Yildirim [Opens in a new window]
Tevfik Murat Yildirim*
Affiliation:
Department of Media and Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: murat.yildirim@uis.no
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Abstract

Much of the vast literature on the substantive representation of women takes as its point of departure important a priori assumptions about the nature of women as a group. Calling for a rethink of many of those assumptions, a recent body of work recommends an inductive approach to defining women's interests. In line with this view, this article draws on a recently constructed dataset that codes nearly a million Americans' policy priorities over the past 75 years to explore what constitutes women's interests and whether gender differences in priorities cut across partisan and racial divisions. The results suggest there are consistent gender gaps across a large number of policy categories, with women showing particular concern for policy areas traditionally associated with issues of ‘women's interests’. While in many policy areas women were more likely to share policy priorities with other women than with their male counterparts of the same race or partisan background, the results also document considerable heterogeneity among women in various policy areas, which has major policy implications for the representation of women's interests.

Keywords

women's substantive representationgenderracepartisanshipintersectionalitypolicy prioritiesmost important problemsUSA
Type
Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 1240 - 1257
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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