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. We solve these problems by analyzing the policy content and authors of partisan think tank reports in the United States. We introduce a dataset of 16,229 authors of 10,386 reports from partisan think tanks in the U.S., coded for their policy content using the Comparative Agendas Project subtopic coding system. 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.