I'm Yasu Solic and I'm the host of BandSplain, a show where we explain cult bands and iconic

artists by going deep into their histories and discographies.

We're back with a brand new season at our brand new home, The Ringer Podcast Network,

tackling a whole new batch of artists, from grunge gods to power pot pioneers to new metal

legends and many, many more.

Listen to new episodes every Thursday, only on Spotify.

Today's episode is about men in America.

I would say there's about a 5% chance this episode gets me in a little bit of trouble,

maybe a 10% chance.

That's because I think it's genuinely difficult to talk about this subject without sometimes

misrepresenting myself.

So I want to take a little bit of extra time today to tell you about why this episode,

this topic, is interesting and important to me.

In the last few years, I've become interested in the emergence of a gender gap in American

politics, where none used to exist.

Since 1980, we have seen a huge gender gap open up in the electorate.

For most of the 20th century, men and women voted very similarly.

But in 1980, there was this sudden and surprising eight percentage point difference between

women and men voting respectively for the Democrat and the Republican, Ronald Reagan.

Incredibly, it was only in a 1981 newspaper article published in the Washington Post that

the term gender gap was coined.

That gap grew from eight points in 1980 to 12 points in 2000 to 13 points in 2016.

...