Women: If not apolitical, then conservative

While the political behaviour of women has been the principal concern of very few voting studies it remains an incidental concern of many. Women are of interest only in so far as they resemble, or fail to resemble, men. Sex, then, is usually included among the background variables in behavioural research. It is largely with analyses of the relationship between sex and voting behaviour by British, American and Australian social scientists, especially political scientists, since the Second World War. To date, even analyses of the political situation of the woman voter by social scientists sympathetic to the women’s movement have been marked more by their endorsement of the ‘findings’ of survey research than by their questioning of them. However familiar expressions such as ‘women are more conservative than men’ may be, their ambiguities, however unintentional, are easily overlooked.