Conservatives have a gender problem

Women are trending left in their politics and ideology, just as men are trending right.

Former Liberal Party staff member Brittany Higgins with Scott Morrison.

Women around the developed world are trending left in their politics and ideology, just as men are trending right. This is an essential backdrop to the controversies of the past three weeks.

No one should underestimate the personal tragedy involved in the underlying events in question. The suicide of a woman who claimed she was raped 33 years ago is a tragedy in itself and profoundly distressing to her family and friends.

The experience that Brittany Higgins relates from when she was a staff member in Linda Reynolds’s office is utterly shocking.

Yet there is ruthless politics at play as well. All over the Western world, women are trending left and progressive in their politics. With many honourable exceptions, they are not leading conservative movements.

It is now a key strategic objective of centre-left parties all over the world to present centre-right parties as hostile to women. The inability of centre-right parties to garner more female votes is a failure on their part, and a broader failure of the conservative intellectual movement.

Conservative men in particular are being badly outplayed on issues relating to gender. They have been deprived of the language of chivalry, which is how they once tried to express a deep regard for women as women. The language of chivalry has been outlawed by their political opponents. It is a forbidden dialect. But conservative men have not mastered the dominant language of wokeness, which in any event contains assumptions hostile to conservative beliefs.

A bizarre mutual gender gap has opened up in the Western world between men, trending right, and women, trending left. It’s not one size fits all. Boris Johnson won women and men in his landslide victory, but he won women by a smaller margin than men. The women’s vote killed Donald Trump’s presidency. According to one study, Joe Biden won 57 per cent of female voters and 45 per cent of men. Trump won 42 per cent of women and 53 per cent of men. The gender gap ran both ways, but the pro-Republican male gender gap was smaller than the pro-Democrat female gender gap.

Gender does not decide everything. The three greatest voting predictors in the US are age, race and gender. Other strong predictors include inner city versus rural, manual versus office worker, government versus private-enterprise employees, welfare recipients etc.

But gender is powerful. Across all factors, it leads to a couple of per cent more support for Democrats. So Trump won white women more narrowly than he won white men, but he lost Latina and black women by vastly bigger margins than he lost Latino and black men. There was a big gender gap in the 2018 midterm congressional elections, which delivered the House of Representatives to Democrats.

The same trends are evident in Australia. The Australian National University’s Election Study for the 2019 election showed that 45 per cent of men were inclined to give their first preference vote to the Liberal-National Coalition, as opposed to 35 per cent of women. Greens are disproportionately supported by women. Pew Research Centre data shows similar trends in Western Europe and Canada.

It’s not, as I say, that all or most women are left and all or most men are right. But across all other variables, women will be a few percentage points more on the progressive side than men. Overall this is a failure by centre-right parties and conservative movements. Over a lifetime in journalism I have attended and reported on hundreds of seminars and conferences of every mainstream political hue. Looking back, I’d say that of all those gatherings that might be described as conservative, attendance was 60 per cent or more male.

There is one element of gender voting patterns that should worry centre-right parties a good deal. British academic Rosalind Shorrocks identifies the key difference between younger women and much more conservative older women as belief in God.

Christianity is not a centre-left or centre-right project. It is open to people who follow almost any nonviolent and non-discriminatory political philosophy. There were once many economically radical political activists who were doctrinally orthodox Christians. One of the most famous, and fascinating, was Dorothy Day, who in the first half of the 20th century founded the Catholic Worker movement. She was a radical on economics and foreign policy, and devoutly orthodox on religious matters and conservative on social issues such as abortion. She is on her way to Catholic sainthood.

That kind of combination no longer exists as radical politics has moved to an all-encompassing identity template that demands adherence to stands that contradict traditional religious belief.

In any event, the reason young women’s progressive outlook should worry thoughtful conservative and centre-right leaders is that it is very likely a cohort effect, not an age effect.

Sociologists measure many “age effect” political and social attitudes. When young people get married, have kids and acquire mortgages, they become conservative. That’s an age effect and sustains conservatives.

One reason that mechanism doesn’t work so well now is that fewer and fewer young people are getting married at all. At the bottom of the income ladder, too many young men lack well-paid regular jobs that would make them husband material. And at the top of the income ladder, too many high-achieving women are worried about taking any substantial time away from their careers to establish marriage and parenthood.

Much more difficult for conservatives than an age effect is a cohort effect, in which the cohort retains its outlook for the whole of its lifetime. There is very little sign that young people are acquiring religious commitment as they grow older.

Given the high correlation between religious practice with social conservatism, that means they are unlikely to give up their progressive outlook as they get older.

Women have not always had a centre-left or progressive bias. It’s 100 years since women got the vote in the US, 102 years in Britain. Australia had full male and female suffrage from 1901. Until about 1960 men and women in the same household in the US tended to vote the same way. In Australia this largely held, too, though women had a slight conservative preference.

The big turning point in the US was the election of Ronald Reagan as president in 1980. The Republican Party became more explicitly socially conservative, especially on abortion, but also on government spending and gun control. Reagan won the election but actually closely lost among women. In 1984 Reagan won a huge landslide. He won women and men. But he won men by a much bigger margin, and the female pro-Democrat gender gap has been there ever since.

There are issues specific to each nation. Support for gun ownership and a willingness to take military action get much less support from women than they do from men in the US. Climate change scores better with women.

Across Western societies, notwithstanding women’s increased participation in the workforce, women still tend to do the vast bulk of care-giving, especially for elder family members; they still have a closer involvement with children, especially very young children; they still do more in arranging schooling than men do.

On top of that, often because deadbeat dads have deserted them, more women live in poverty than men.

And, finally, women tend to work disproportionately in industries where the employer is the government, such as nursing and teaching.

Thus, without being very ideological, there is a perfectly reasonable set of factors that mean more women would tend to support the party traditionally more in favour of government spending. Starting with George W. Bush in the US, and to some extent with John Howard in Australia (although he certainly balanced the budget and deserves vast credit for that), centre-right parties have become “big-government conservatives”.

That is true in spades of Johnson in Britain, and was true before COVID came along and forced all governments of every persuasion to become big spenders.

But in analysing political preference trends of women in the West, these should not be reduced to economic determinism. It is one of the worst features of old-style Marxist analysis to hold that crude economic interests determine all politics. There are also powerful cultural forces at work. On the whole, almost all the cultural battles have been won, or are being won, by the left.

Conservatives win brilliant tactical victories as they retreat ever further. This allows them to win a lot of elections in the path of retreat. An orderly retreat is much better than a panicked flight. But an orderly retreat is still not victory. It is also the fact in some ­places, parts of centre-right politics have become ugly in a way that is particularly unappealing to women. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat famously remarked: “If you didn’t like the religious right, wait until you meet the post-religious right.” When the transcendent is removed from conservative inspiration, its manners can become just as ugly as those on the left.

It can be reduced to little more than nationalism and tribalism. Sometimes, in viscerally rejecting a left-wing ideology, it can become extremely aggressive and confrontational, as in Trump’s style. That style is a turn-off to many women.

Another huge factor is the ruthlessly effective, often dishonest, way the left plays gender politics. The rush to judgment against Christian Porter, the denial of due process and natural justice, the condemnation by accusation without any consideration for the personal cost, has been extremely ugly and unprincipled.

Its excess is so obvious that its electoral outcome could be more equivocal than its proponents think. But it probably has had an effect in conveying to at least some voters the idea that the Liberals are hostile to women.

Certainly the Liberal Party does not have enough female MPs. Losing a woman of Nicolle Flint’s quality is tragic, an indictment of the party’s failure to support and protect its own.

It’s also a sign of the double standards of much media and contemporary culture that almost insanely over-polices conservative speech but allows abuse of conservatives, such as Flint, to go mostly unremarked.

There is a lot of dishonesty in this. In one of the ABC’s reports it questioned whether Porter should be allowed to stay in cabinet given the “gravity of the revelations” about him. This is quite wrong. It would have been honest to talk about the gravity of the allegations, but to call untested allegations revelations conveys a false view of what has been established.

The worst recent example of mad double standards and absurd politicisation is the criticism of Scott Morrison for saying he talked about Brittany Higgins’s experience with his wife, and he thought about it in relation to his daughters.

Sexual assault survivor Grace Tame gave a magnificent and moving address, beyond politics, at the National Press Club. Journalists desperately wanted to politicise her remarks. The successful “gotcha” journalist’s question claimed that Morrison had to talk to his wife before he knew what to say about Higgins. This is entirely untrue. He spoke about the matter previously, before talking to his wife. Tame responded in a way that seemed critical of Morrison partly because she was answering a question based on false information.

This provoked the familiar, sterile jamboree of abuse of Morrison. As a father and grandfather I can testify that when something terrible happens to someone in the age cohort of your own kids your mind turns, among other things, to them.

This is not wicked sexism. The left has been gravely successful in demonising normal human reactions among conservatives, on the basis apparently that all conservatives are guilty by definition.

In trying to pre-emptively condemn an entire half of politics, the left cynically misuses human suffering. But for all that, the conservative failure with too many women is not entirely the left’s fault. It’s a failure by conservatives as well.