What's changed and what hasn't when it comes to the gender divide in Alberta politics

A lot has changed when it comes to men, women and society over the last 30 years, but some of the same gender divides that we saw decades ago still show up in politics today.

Women in Alberta are more likely to position themselves on the left side of the political spectrum and men on the right, according to data from the Vote Compass tool gathered over the past few weeks, which mirrors decades of polling and public-opinion surveys across Canada.

Women are also more likely to cite health care and education as the issues most important to them, while men are more likely to cite economic and financial issues.

None of that comes as a surprise to political scientists who have studied the role of gender in politics. They've seen similar patterns for a long time, dating back to an era when women and men played more distinct roles in society than they do today.

Some well known political theory from the 20th century suggests the difference in political views is rooted in these social differences. Men were more likely to play an economic role in society, working and earning money, while women were more likely to play a social role, raising children and caring for family members. So it made sense that men's political concerns were more fiscal, women's more social.

But today, the gendered nature of these roles has shifted. Women aremore likely to be primary breadwinners in a household than they were in the past, and men are more likely to spend time raising children.

And yet the gendered nature of political views remains. Why?

There's not a simple answer to that question but Alberta-based political scientists who study this topic have a few ideas.

One is that the gendered nature of social roles takes a long time to truly change, and perhaps even longer when it comes to politics. Another is that one of the more rapid shifts in gender roles we've seen in post-secondary education is reinforcing the "economic-man, social-woman" divide.

The data

Tens of thousands of Albertans have responded to the Vote Compass online tool, which asks users dozens of questions about their views on a range of topics.

One of the questions asks users where they would place themselves on the left-right political spectrum on a scale from 0 to 10, with 0 being the most far-left and 10 being the most far-right.

The proportion of people who rated themselves dead-centre as a 5 was almost perfectly split between men and women.

But the self-ratings became more dominated by women on the left side of the spectrum, and more dominated by men on the right.

Lisa Young, a political scientist with the University of Calgary, wasn't surprised by these results.

While the specifics of gender divides in political views may fluctuate depending on the specifics of a given election in a given place at a given time,overall Young says the same patterns have persisted for decades.

"I would be hard pressed to say that gender gaps have grown or shrunk or taken on a new form," she said. "I think there's actually remarkable consistency in the overall pattern that we see, even though it plays out differently in in each context."

She said a similar pattern played out in the results to another Vote Compass question:What issue is most important to you in this election?

Health care was the most common response, but it was significantly more common among women, with 36 per cent of female respondents citing health care versus 23 per cent of men.

Men, by contrast, were more likely to citethe economy or finances, with 20 per cent of male respondents citing that issue versus just 10 per cent of women.

Young says the Vote Compass responses reminded her of a classic academic paper on the topic of gender divides, whiche dates back to the 1988 Canadian federal election.

The paper by Elisabeth Gidengil and titledEconomic Man Social Woman? examined why support for the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement of the era had varying levels of support between men and women.

"Itheorize these differences in terms of 'social woman'and 'economic man,'" Gidengil wrote.

"The results support this interpretation. Men were more likely to bring economic considerations to bear in evaluating the agreement, whereas women's opinions were more likely to be influenced by their commitment to the welfare state and their greater concern for social programs."

Fast forward nearly three decades and we still see a similar divide in Albertans' views heading into the 2023 Alberta election.

Changing, slow and fast

Lori Williams, a political scientist with Calgary's Mount Royal University, believes the persistent patterns are related to persistent gender roles.

As much as some things have changed,she says, a lot has also stayed the same.

"The numbers still are showing that the majority of the household duties childcare, eldercare, family care issuesthe majority of those are still being done by women," she said.

In terms of hours spent, women handled 72 per cent of child-care duties in 1986, according to a study from Statistics Canada. By 2015, that was down, but not by a large margin, to 65 per cent.

Women were also more likely than men to report spending 10 hours a week or more providing care to a family member or friend with a long-term illness or disability.

As a result, women end up interacting with the health-care system more often not just for themselves but for children and other loved ones that they're caring for.

"And so they're more attuned to the concerns of the health-care system," Young said.

But while many gender roles have persisted, there is one area where women have quickly made up ground on what was once a male-dominated domain.

Post-secondary education

"Women are now much more likely to attend post-secondary education than men are," said Young.

And this, she said, may actually reinforce the gender divide in politics.

Polling data and academic research has generally found that people with a university education tend to position themselves more on the left side of the political spectrum than those without a university education, she noted.

"There's what's being referred to in some of the literature as the 'diploma divide' and it's gendered because women are more likely to get a university degree than men," Young said.

"And that certainly is the case in Alberta."

Add it all up, and you get a complex picture of how men and women interact differently with society and thus with politics.

While the net result may be a familiar split on left-right ideology, it's not like nothing has changed.

No matter who wins on May 29, a woman will be Alberta's next premier. Both Rachel Notley and Danielle Smith have campaigned on $10-per-day daycare. The NDP are running more female candidates than male candidates.

These facts are not particularly remarkable in the 2023provincial election, but they would be much harder to imagine in 20th-century Alberta.

"In many ways, there's a lot more diversity in Alberta now than there was even 20 years ago," said Williams.

"So there is a shift that has been happening ... and it's having an impact in terms of who the different parties pitch to when they're trying to win over votes."

How Vote Compass data is gathered and interpreted

Developed by a team of social and statistical scientists from Vox Pop Labs, Vote Compass is a civic engagement application offered in Alberta exclusively by CBC Radio-Canada. The findings in this story are based on 26,808 respondents who participated in Vote Compass from April 30 to May 18, 2023.

Unlike online opinion polls, respondents to Vote Compass are not pre-selected. Similar to opinion polls, however, the data is a non-random sample from the population and has been weighted in order to approximate a representative sample.

Vote Compass data has been weighted by gender, age, education, region and partisanship to ensure the sample's composition reflects that of the actual population of Alberta according to census data and other population estimates.