Career Adapt-Abilities Scale (CAAS-International)
Category: Student Well-Being
Women in the United States have outpaced men in both voter participation and educational attainment in recent decades. Since education is closely tied to political participation, we consider these trends in tandem and assess how much of the gender gap in voting is attributable to differences in educational attainment, differential returns to education, or other, non-education related elements. Using comprehensive educational data from Massachusetts students matched with voter records, we estimate a Blinder–Oaxaca–Kitagawa decomposition to understand how these factors contribute to gender voting differentials. In our data, we observe young women outvoting young men by 5 percentage points in the first presidential election in which they can vote after having potentially completed college. We find that just over 50 percent of this gap in voting can be explained by differences in educational attainment by gender. These results broadly suggest that a significant portion of the gender gap in voting can be attributed to the rise in women’s education. If men’s educational levels reached those of women, we would expect the gender voting gap to shrink significantly.
Keywords
civic returns to education, gender gap, voting, years of education
Education level
Document Object Identifier (DOI)
10.26300/7md9-7z05
