Gender Gap No; Marriage Gap Yes

Ignore the media hype about a Gender Gap, argues Kay Hymowitz at City Journal. It's really a Marriage Gap, and it isn't limited to gender: a majority of female and male marrieds voted Republican, while a majority of female and male singles voted Democrat.

The truth, though, is that other demographic characteristics have considerably more significance. A widely reported example is marital status. Fifty-three percent of married female voters went for Romney. Among single women, by contrast, Romney was about as popular as an extra 20 pounds; a mere 31 percent supported him. The gap between married and single women, then, is wider than the male-female gap that the media have been touting.

In other words, married women voted less as part of a sisterhood than as part of a cohort of white people holding college diplomas, earning more than $50,000 a year, and wearing reading glasses.

Similarly, unmarried women voted just the way you'd expect them to, considering their age, income, education, race, and ethnicity. A large number of unmarried women are single mothers—and minorities are disproportionately represented among that population. More than 30 percent of single mothers are Hispanic, and 28 percent are black, even though Hispanics are just 17 percent of the population and blacks 12 percent. Single mothers are also likely to be younger, less educated, and poorer than married women are. Sure enough, all these groups went Democratic in this election. The category "single women" also includes childless women in their twenties and thirties. These are by definition part of the "youth vote," which went heavily for Obama, regardless of gender.

Men, too, have a marriage gap, though it’s a less dramatic one. Sixty-two percent of married men voted Republican, while 55 percent of single men voted Democratic. No surprise: single men, like single women, are more likely to have lower incomes, to be young, and to be black or Hispanic.

She finds another surprising fact among the data: "The gender gap expanded not because more women went blue but because so many men switched to red."