Research in political behaviour has for some time pointed to the existence of a ‘gender gap,’ between the political attitudes of men and women. Men and women diverge in their attitudes on many political issues, including foreign policy, social welfare spending, and crime and punishment. With this focus on the differences between women and men in political survey research, it is important to better understand the underlying assumption: that women and men form two distinct groups which can be isolated and analyzed. Furthermore, this research assumes that the biological difference of sex is synonymous with the socially constructed concept of gender. Especially in quantitative analysis, the two concepts are used interchangeably, and scholars do not carefully consider the important distinctions between sex and gender.
Gender research asserts that in fact, gender is not dichotomous, but more closely reflects “a continuum of norms and behaviours socially constructed, socially perpetuated, and socially alterable” (Mackie, 2). Understanding gender as distinct from sex, and assessing attitudes and values accordingly may provide new insight into the ‘gender gap.’ Using data gathered during four provincial elections in Canada, we compare the traditional variable of ‘sex’ with a new variable that measures gender as a continuum, in hopes of better understanding the gender gap in political attitudes.
