Despite Common Concerns, American Women Remain Deeply Divided
What Women Want Now is a program by HuffPost and her sister sites dedicated to creating content about the issues and stories that matter most to women – you can read more here.
Sharp differences of opinion on gender, sexism and harassment separate American women from each other, according to a new HuffPost/Yahoo/CARE survey. Even though women share some of the same concerns, they’re far from a unified bloc.
Nationwide, the majority of women are concerned about pay inequality and see gender bias in politics. Most are enthusiastic about seeing more women in positions of power in the United States and think American women should play a role in reducing gender-based discrimination elsewhere in the world. About half have faced inappropriate sexual advances.
But as the survey shows, women also remain sharply divided along partisan lines in their beliefs and experiences. (Read the full survey and analysis here.)
About three-quarters of women consider the pay gap between men and women to be a problem. But there’s a huge partisan divide in terms of how women weigh that problem. Where 63 percent of Democrats say it’s a serious one, just 26 percent of Republicans believe the same. Similarly, 83 percent of women, including a majority in both parties, say sexual harassment is a problem ― but 81 percent of Democrats, compared to 47 percent of Republicans, consider it serious.
There are also partisan differences in beliefs about sexism. Democratic women are slightly more than twice as likely as Republican women to believe that men today generally have things easier. They’re about three times likelier to say efforts to ensure equal rights for women in this country have yet to go far enough. Republican women, on the other hand, are less likely to want to work specifically for another woman, or to actively want more female leaders in their own workplace.
Read more from the survey here.
