Gendered Issues or Partisan Priorities? The Policy Priorities of Men and Women at Partisan Think Tanks

This paper examines the relationship between gender, partisanship, and authorship of partisan think tank reports. Scholars often observe a gendered dimension to issues, where women are associated with issues related to child-rearing, education, and social welfare while men are associated with issues related to violent state action, such as foreign policy and crime. However, these studies are often limited by the confounding variable of partisanship, where political parties tend to prioritize certain issues, and gender gaps between parties. We introduce a new dataset of 15,589 authors of 9,944 reports from the American Enterprise Institute, Center for American Progress, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Heritage Foundation. We find that while women elites tend to prioritize issues often associated with women in both parties, prioritization of issues by sex is more complicated than much of the literature suggests.