Bringing Gender into the Gender Gap: 2024 Post-Election Reflection Series

Bringing Gender into the Gender Gap

by Dan Cassino, Fairleigh Dickinson University 

Bringing gender into our understanding of voting in the 2024 US Presidential election not only uncovers another gender gap, it goes a long way towards explaining Donald Trump’s victory in that contest. Since the 2016 US Presidential election, political science researchers have begun to pay much greater attention to how gender – masculinity and femininity – shapes vote choice.

Among many others, Monika McDermott has written extensively about how gender structures political views. Erin Cassese has looked at how the gendering of policies has shaped voter understanding of campaign attacks, and even issue areas like foreign policy. But few surveys have directly measured masculinity or femininity or linked them to vote choice: when the New York Times or ABC News or even the Center for American Women in Politics talks about “the gender gap,” they’re talking about differences between men and women. For instance, the Center for American Women and Politics defines a gender gap in voting as “a difference between the percentage of women and the percentage of men voting for a given candidate.”  

In the past, the decision to equate sex and gender might have made sense, as the scales used to measure gender were borrowed from work in other fields, and were too long and unwieldy to include in most political surveys. But in recent years, researchers have moved towards simply asking people how masculine or feminine they consider themselves to be, an approach recently taken up by the American National Election Study.  

In addition to the logistical challenges of including batteries of questions to measure how masculine or feminine someone is, there are also real conceptual differences between the old-style scales and the self-description questions.

Asking people how masculine or feminine they consider themselves to be means understanding gender as a social identity, like partisanship or race, one that cannot be well captured through binary measures I’ve made use of gender self-placement measures on surveys for several years and have been surprised by how much they tell us about vote choice and other political views. 

In an August 2024 national poll of the US Presidential election (n=801) using these measures, Trump had a substantial lead over Kamala Harris among men, 47 to 40, while women favored Harris 56 to 38.

But while this difference is generally referred to as the “gender gap,” another      gender gap – based on the asserted gender identity of individuals – is much wider. Men who describe themselves as “completely masculine” on a six-point scale that runs from “completely masculine” to “completely feminine” (about half of men in the US) favor Trump over Harris by a 32-point margin, 60 to 28. Men who identify any other way on this scale favor Harris by an 18-point margin, 51 to 33.  

There actually isn’t much of a difference based on gender among women, using this scale: women who say that they’re “completely feminine” do not differ different in their 2024 presidential preference than women who place themselves in other gender categories. In fact, women are not much different than men who identify as anything other than “completely masculine,” favoring Harris by 18 points. The big gender gap, then, isn’t between men and women: it’s between men who embrace traditional masculinity – those that describe themselves as “completely masculine” – and everyone else, men and women.  

But even that misses one of the key components of Trump’s win in 2024. While he’s always had the support of “completely masculine” men, who tend to be older, less educated and more Republican than other men, in 2024 he also did well among some men who aren’t in that group. In addition to asking respondents to place themselves on a masculinity/femininity scale, the August 2024 survey also asked them to answer a short version of the Masculine Role Norms Inventory (MRNI). This battery asks respondents about their view of stereotypical male behaviors, like preferring football to soap operas, or saying that men should always be the boss. There isn’t a big difference in vote preferences between men who score high on this scale versus those that score low, but there is a gap when we interact MRNI scores with men’s asserted gender identity. 

The highest levels of support are from men who say that they’re “completely masculine” and have high scores on the MRNI, who favor Trump by a huge 50-point margin 72 to 22 over Harris. Men who aren’t “completely masculine” and have lower than average scores on the MRNI are almost the mirror opposite, favoring Harris over Trump 73 to 18. 

Men who identify as “completely masculine” are more likely to favor Trump, men who identify any other way – most of whom say that they’re “mostly masculine” – are less likely to favor him, and more likely to favor Harris. But there seems to be an important exception. Men who do not identify as  “completely masculine” but have high scores on the MRNI favor Trump by a 22-point margin, 56 to 34. In the survey, these men tend to be younger, more likely to identify as political independents, and are disproportionately Black and Hispanic: 34 percent of Black and Hispanic men, versus 21 percent of White men. Their high scores on the MRNI indicate that these men value traditional ideas of masculinity, but their responses to the gender self-placement item indicate that they don’t feel they’re masculine enough to call themselves “completely masculine.” 

These are mostly young men who value traditional masculinity – as evidenced by their high scores on the MRNI – but are not completely secure in their own masculinity: at least not enough to call themselves “completely masculine.” If they didn’t value traditional masculinity, falling short of it wouldn’t necessarily be a problem: but their high scores on the MRNI indicate that they do value it, and are experiencing some degree of what’s referred to as “gender role strain.” This means that there’s a discrepancy between what the gender identity they want, and the one that they believe themselves to have, a discrepancy that has been shown to lead behaviors that attempt to symbolically fill that gap. 

Why would these men be turning to Trump?

We don’t know why these men don’t consider themselves to be completely masculine, but decades of research on masculinities has given us a good idea of what leads men to believe that they have met the demands of masculinity. They’re supposed to be breadwinners, supporting a family, owning a house in a safe neighborhood; but goals like these are harder than ever to attain. The reasons why men are no longer able to support a family and buy a house on a single income are complicated, but Trump has claimed that he can bring back factory jobs from China, that he can make housing affordable by deporting undocumented immigrants, that he can eliminate what they see as unfair competition by getting rid of DEI programs. Whether any of these policies will actually be desirable or effective is beside the point: Trump is promising to do something for a group that feels like it has been left behind. 

In a relatively close election like 2024 (or 2020, or 2016), all sorts of factors are potentially decisive, but Trump’s improved performance with young men, and with Black and Hispanic men is one of the most notable differences between his win in 2024 and his loss in 2020. In the 2024 exit polls, Trump doubled his support among Black men compared to 2020, and won 47 percent of Hispanic men. As in the title of a ground-breaking 2017 Political Behavior article from Amanda Bittner and Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant, “sex isn’t gender,” and what’s going on within sex groups is just as important and interesting as what’s going on between them. There are concerns that measuring gender is difficult, that it takes too much space in surveys, or that it could turn off survey respondents. Related attitudes and traits, like sexism, feminism and gender ideology are important, and have substantial effects on vote choice, but they’re not enough: we need to measure gender, and pay attention to what it’s telling us. 

Dan Cassino is a professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and the Executive Director of the FDU Poll. His research focuses on the role of masculinity in political behavior and survey measurement. His most recent book, co-edited with Monika McDermott, is “Masculinity in American Politics” (NYU Press, 2025).