My dissertation, The Issue With Women, seeks to challenge and investigate the ways in which “women’s issues” have been measured and defined in the past. I distinguish between women’s issues as categorized through expectations/stereotypes and women’s issues as categorized through behavior to create a more nuanced understanding of these concepts. I also examine these two dimensions at both the public level through public policy opinion data and at the elite level through a content analysis of candidate websites and congressional bill sponsorships. Within each research method I center intersectionality, with the idea that different aspects of identity– gender, race, and partisanship– can influence actions and preferences. 

At the public level, I use a survey question asking respondents about the “most important issue” facing the country to define “women’s issues–” an approach which factors in issue importance which previous measurements focusing solely on a gender gap in public opinion have not. At the elite level I use issue priorities on candidate websites, and issue topics of bill sponsorships to let candidate and legislator behavior define women’s issues, instead of using a pre-determined list to measure descriptive and substantive representation. With each of these analyses I examine trends across gender, race, and partisanship as well as through the interactions of these variables. Finally, I contribute to the expectations and stereotypes literature through two novel conjoint experiments. The first measures how respondents assign issue priorities to candidates who are varied on their gender, race, and party identification. The second uses the results from the first experiment to measure how evaluations of candidates change depending on if their issue priorities conform to or defy expectations. 

This project will aid in future gender and politics research by providing clarification on the categorization of women’s issues and how it relates to questions of representation.