Whatever Happened to the Gender Gap?

By Jennifer L. Pozner, Women's Review of Books. Posted February 5, 2002.

Let's call it "The Case of the Missing Gender Gap." Ever since September 11, corporate media have denied that men and women have significant differences of opinion on terrorism and war, despite contradictory evidence in polls conducted before and after we dropped our first bomb on Afghanistan. To solve this mystery we have to start at the beginning of George W. Bush's new world order -- when, in the president's words, anyone who did not support America's "war on terrorism" would be judged to be in cahoots with "the evildoers."

Following the devastating attacks, major news networks subjected a shocked nation to video clips of the Twin Towers being struck by planes, exploding in flames and collapsing, often accompanied by "Oh my God!" audio, on repetitive-loop day and night. (Talk about a recipe for post-traumatic stress disorder.) These painful images sometimes appeared in split-screen while anxious anchors interviewed current and former White House and Pentagon officials, security experts and CIA spooks, who presented military retaliation and civil liberties rollbacks as necessary and inevitable. While such sources made up more than half the authorities appearing on NBC, ABC and CBS in the week following the attacks, experts from the international law community who could advocate legal, non-military responses to crimes against humanity were nowhere to be seen on these programs, according to a survey by the media watch group FAIR.

Feminists and progressives who dared give the question "Why do they hate us?" an answer more substantial than the ubiquitous "because we love freedom" -- say, by noting that the Arab world has never forgotten Madeleine Albright's 1996 comment on CBS that half a million dead Iraqi children were "worth the price" of US sanctions -- were quickly labeled traitors, or worse.

When Susan Sontag sinned in the New Yorker's first post-9/11 issue by noting that US foreign policy might have contributed to the vicious anti-American sentiment behind the attacks, Newsweek's Jonathan Alter blasted her in a scathing column titled "Blame America At Your Peril." It was "ironic," Alter hissed, that "the same people always urging us to not blame the victim in rape cases are now saying Uncle Sam wore a short skirt and asked for it."

And when a small but vocal peace movement called for the US to "prosecute the criminals" rather than bomb innocent Afghans, their dissent was either ignored or distorted by a derisive press -- as when the New York Times reported a late September anti-war action in DC under the headline "Protesters in Washington Urge Peace With Terrorists."

Amid this "with us or against us" feeding frenzy, poll stories proliferated, with headlines like the Washington Post's September 29 "Public Unyielding in War Against Terror; 9 in 10 Back Robust Military Response." The numbers seemed overwhelming: the "9 in 10" figure measured Bush's approval rating, while upwards of four-fifths of the public generally supported some sort of military action. According to the Post, Americans were "unswerving" in their support for war and unified in their "demand for a full-scale response."

But were they, really? Buried at the end of the 1,395-word story was the striking information that women "were significantly less likely to support a long and costly war" then were men, and their hesitant support might develop into "hardened opposition" over time. In fact, though 44 percent of women said they'd favor a broad military effort, "48 percent said they want a limited strike or no military action at all."

The gender gap appeared again in an October 5 CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, which found that 64 percent of men thought the US "should mount a long-term war" and just 24 percent favored limiting retaliation to punishing the specific groups responsible for the attacks -- but that women were "evenly divided -- with 42 percent favoring each option." Though 88 percent of women and 90 percent of men support some military action, women reconsider in greater numbers as soon as conditional questions are asked, Gallup's analysis showed. For example, only 55 percent of women said they would support military action if a thousand American troops would be killed, whereas 76 percent of men would still support a lengthy war under these circumstances; women were also much less likely than men to support war if it would continue for several years, bring about an economic recession, or provoke further terrorist attacks at home.

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