I found an interesting article about the traditional and modern gender gaps. Here's evidence of the traditional gender gap of women being more on the Right than men:
<blockquote>The early classics in the 1950s and 1960s established the orthodoxy in political science; gender differences in voting tended to be fairly modest but nevertheless women were found to be more apt than men to support center–right parties in Western Europe and in the United States, a pattern which we can term the traditional gender gap (Duverger, 1955: 65–66; Lipset, 1960: 143; Pulzer, 1967: 52; Butler and Stokes, 1974: 160; Campbell et al., 1960: 493). Inglehart (1977: 229) confirmed that in the early 1970s women remained more likely to support Christian Democrat and Conservative parties in Western Europe, particularly in Italy and Germany (see Table 1), although a new pattern appeared to be emerging in the United States.
TABLE 1. Gender Gap in the Early 1970s. Society Men Women Gap Italy 44 30 –14 Germany 60 47 –13 Britain 50 41 –9 Belgium 40 36 –6 France 54 49 –5 Netherlands 47 45 –2 USA 32 37 +5 Note: Percentage supporting parties of the left. Source: Inglehart, The Silent Revolution, 1977: 228.
Most explanations of the traditional gender gap emphasized structural sex differences in religiosity, longevity, and labor force participation; for example, women in Italy and France were more likely to attend churches associated with Christian Democratic parties (Lipset, 1960: 260; Blondel, 1970: 55–56). By implication, in this era women were also commonly assumed to be more conservative in their political attitudes and values, producing an ideological gap underpinning their party preferences (for a critical summary of the literature, however, see Goot and Reid, 1984). The conventional wisdom was summarized in The Civic Culture, first published in 1963: "Wherever the consequences of women's suffrage have been studied, it would appear that women differ from men in their political behavior only in being somewhat more frequently apathetic, parochial, [and] conservative. . . . Our data, on the whole, confirm the findings reported in the literature" (Almond and Verba, 1963: 325). (Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, "The Developmental Theory of the Gender Gap: Women's and Men's Voting Behavior in Global Perspective," International Political Science Review/ Revue internationale de science politique, 21.4 (2000), pp. 443-444, <http://ips.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/4/441></blockquote>
Then, a new type of gender gap -- women leaning more to the Left than to the Right -- began to emerge in richer nations.
<blockquote>What is striking is that in postindustrial societies in the 1990s the modern gender gap, with women significantly more left wing than men, is evident in almost half the nations under comparison. Women are significantly more right wing in only two (Finland and Spain) and in the remainder there is no significant gender difference. In contrast, in the eight developing societies women proved significantly more right wing in four and more left wing in only one (Argentina). Across all advanced industrialized democracies the gender gap in voting was +.10 (with women leaning left), whereas it was –.08 in postcommunist societies, and –.14 in developing societies (with women leaning right). This offers important evidence providing initial confirmation of our first hypothesis, that the gender gap is consistently associated at national level with the process of economic and political modernization. The traditional right-wing gap remains prevalent in developing societies but a pattern of convergence or gender realignment is evident in more developed societies. This lends support to the hypothesis that the shift towards the left among women is strongly influenced by the modernization process. (Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, "The Developmental Theory of the Gender Gap: Women's and Men's Voting Behavior in Global Perspective," International Political Science Review/ Revue internationale de science politique, 21.4 (2000), p. 450, <http://ips.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/21/4/441></blockquote>
This international gap among women creates a problem for proponents of transnational feminism, which is seldom noted in feminist literature: women tend to lean to the Left in richer nations (the modern gender gap of women leaning to the Left and men leaning to the Right more pronounced among younger generations in rich nations as well), but women tend to lean to the Right in poorer nations, including postcommunist societies. What feminists in richer nations want is often very different from what a majority of women in poorer nations want, at least for now, and probably for quite some time to come. -- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>