In American civic life, there is a difference between who shows up and who says they do
by Anna O’Sullivan
I frequently attend political events where I find myself surrounded, overwhelmingly, by women.
At a recent fundraiser, I made a joke about this to two women, who then shared that they had both attempted, but failed, to persuade their husbands to attend the event that night. “Again!” they half-laughed and half-rolled their eyes.
This is a pattern I’ve noticed in my circles. I know many very smart, politically aware men who choose to comment from the sidelines. Meanwhile, many of the women I know treat active civic engagement like a full-time obligation. I don’t mean to generalize too much — I know many people who defy either oversimplification. But I started to develop a hypothesis: women are simply engaging more in civic activities.
However, the survey data says the opposite.
When asked whether they’ve attended a meeting, put up a political sign, contacted a public official, participated in a protest, or worked on a campaign in the past year, men claim to significantly outperform women.
However, I may have more than my own intuition arguing that we need to be skeptical of these results. My lab colleague Caroline Soler recently published a piece showing evidence that men appear to embellish on surveys at a higher rate than women. This is important because much of our knowledge about political participation, including the idea that men are more civically active, relies heavily on self-reporting. Most of the time, researchers aren’t standing by with clipboards to catch people emailing city councilors or knocking on doors; they’re simply asking them if they did.
We can challenge purely self-reported data by comparing the results to prior research. For example, a 2017 study analyzed thousands of participants in Massachusetts zoning and planning board meetings — key venues for civic engagement on housing policy. Women made up 51% of the voters at the meetings, whereas, based on the CES survey, we may have expected a much lower percentage, since men are almost twice as likely as women to say that they attend local meetings. However, it is worth noting that, according to this study, women accounted for only 43.5% of the commenters. So, even though women made up a small majority of attendees, they were less likely to be the ones taking the mic.
We can also challenge self-reported data in campaign work. While the survey showed that a greater proportion of men report involvement in campaign work than women, the political volunteer platform Mobilize reported that 62% of their volunteers were women in 2020.
Established research does suggest that men contact public officials more frequently. However, this research also relies heavily on self-reported survey data. I reached out to elected officials to request access to their constituent contact logs, but these attempts were unsuccessful. So, we remain limited to self-reported numbers. Still, given what we know about men’s tendency to overreport political participation on surveys and the discrepancies I’ve discussed in their reporting of meeting attendance and campaign work, we should be cautious about taking claims of men’s greater political outreach at face value.
A staggering example of the discrepancy comes when we look at self-reporting of protest attendance versus the demographic breakdown of protests in reality. In-person surveys of protests revealed a shocking gender breakdown: the 2017 Women’s March was made up of 85% women, the March for Science was 54%, the People’s Climate March was 57%, the March for Racial Justice was 66%, March for Our Lives was 70%, and Families Belong Together was 71%. This reveals two things. First, women are clearly showing up at least equally if not more than men to many protests. Secondly, it suggests that subject matter is a key determinant of gender differences in civic participation.
CIRCLE found that young women are more active in “social movements like Black Lives Matter, environmental activism, #MeToo, reproductive rights activism, and the gun violence prevention movement” while “young men — particularly young White men — are more likely to be involved in conservative movements like MAGA and pro-Second Amendment activism.” Reflecting on it now, I realize that my initial impressions weren’t about political participation in general — they were about participation specifically in progressive social movements. These are the spaces that feel particularly women-driven.
In summary, this data was not the landslide victory for my hypothesis that I was expecting. I don’t get to add a snappy title about how men need to get with the program and join civic life. However, it appears that men are inflating the degree to which they report their civic engagement, and while this overinflation appears to be a particularly gendered issue, it should lead us to be skeptical of any self-reported results about civic engagement.
While standing around with a clipboard may sound miserable for everyone involved, promoting methods for tracking civic engagement without self-reporting, such as simple sign-in sheets at events or demographic publications of constituent logs, could help paint a truer picture of who is actually showing up. Even with legitimate privacy concerns, there are ways to collect basic, anonymized information, such as age range and gender, which we already request on surveys. This can tell us far more about the real shape of our civic life.