A vast literature documents differences in policy preferences among women and men in Canada and around the world. Yet much of the research uses cross-sectional data, with fewer studies exploring how gender gaps evolve over time. Most research on Canada was published in the late 1990s and early aughts and focuses on a period when the gender gap was widening. Our paper takes a longer-term view, combining public opinion data from Gallup surveys and the Canadian Election Study to accomplish two goals: i) to show when and for which issues gender gaps emerge and how they shift over time; and ii) to connect changes in gender gaps to broader shifts in women’s legal and economic status and to political developments that could be expected to affect women and men differently, for example, welfare state retrenchment or adoption of the Charter.
The paper has both descriptive and theoretical contributions. Descriptively, it will be the first to offer a long-term historical picture of the evolution of gender gaps in public opinion in Canada. Theoretically, knowing when gender gaps emerge, shrink, or widen allows us to contribute to broader scholarly debates about the sources of gender differences in public opinion, namely, whether such differences owe to gender role socialization or a gendered division of labour that makes women more economically vulnerable.
