Hey, everybody. Plain English is going to have one episode next week, the week of Memorial Day.

We're going to skip our Tuesday episode and talk to you on Friday. After that, we'll be back to our regular schedule.

So just so you know, we'll see you Tuesday, but we'll talk to you Friday.

In 1920, the U.S. ratified the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

But for the first few decades, women did not vote like a new or individual group.

Many of them did not bother to vote at all.

When they voted, they typically voted like men.

Most specifically, they voted like their husbands.

In 1940, the pollstered George Gallup said this of women's voting behavior. Quote,

how will they vote on election day? Just exactly as they were told the night before.

End quote. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, with the rise of modern feminism, this started to shift.

In 1980, it changed for good.

Under Ronald Reagan, the Republican Party moved right on a handful of issues that women

cared deeply about.

The GOP came out against the Equal Rights Amendment, embraced an anti-abortion position,

and merged with conservative Christianity to criticize working women

as an attack on traditional family structure.

Reagan won in a walk, but he lost women by eight percentage points.

Only then, the following year, did the Washington Post first coined the term gender gap.

That gender gap hasn't gone away. By several measures, it's grown to a double-digit divide.

In 2024, John Seidz, a political scientist at Vanderbilt University, told me that while the

gender gap is real, it's not the biggest

...