Have Girls, Votes Feminist

I haven't even been elected to anything, and I'm already signing legislation mandating that the morning-after pill be available at all coffeeshops, next to the artificial sweeteners.

If you want to know how a male legislator is going to vote on abortion-related legislation, you should find out how many daughters he has, a new study suggests. A Yale academic used voting-record scores for male legislators, compiled by the National Organization for Women and the National Right to Life Committee, to assess whether there was a link between having female children and taking a more liberal position on “women’s issues,” defined broadly to include topics from education to health care to abortion rights. The author found that the higher the proportion of female children in a U.S. congressman’s family, the more likely he was to lean left on these issues—that is, to have a higher NOW score and a lower NRLC score. (The pattern exists with both Democrats and Republicans.) ... The “daughter gap” widens when abortion rights are at stake: the relationship between having more daughters and having a liberal voting record was strongest for legislation specifically related to abortion and contraception.

(From the Atlantic, which also links to the economist's article.)

In this as in so many other areas, GWB is a horrible exception to the statistical rule.