Male and Female Legislators Process Info Differently

September 2019

Political scientists from the University of Tennessee surveyed more than 600 state legislators from all 50 states and discovered that the way men and women gather and assess information differs markedly.

Among the researchers’ findings are that female lawmakers

• Attend to more information than their male counterparts.
• Rely less on their own thoughts and experiences
• Consider a “larger range of argument types when they make legislative decisions”
• Are more likely to “seriously consider dense, credible, policy and economic analytical arguments”

And here’s a bonus that should be of special interest to lobbyists:

“Female legislators are more likely than male legislators are to attend to information from interest groups, research studies, states and agencies and departments, and local politicians.”

The survey supports earlier research into the differences between the sexes “which shows that in contrast to men, women are comprehensive information processors who instead of zeroing in on one or a few information sources when a choice opportunity presents itself, attempt to assimilate and process all the information available to them.”

A couple of caveats: First, the researchers concede the response rate to their survey “is quite low.” But they say their sample is also “unusually broad,” containing lawmakers from all 50 states, and “appears to quite closely reflect the population of state legislators at large. For example, 26.4 percent of our respondents are women, compared to 24.5 percent of state legislators in the United States.”

Second, while the findings show that “women rely less on their own thoughts and experiences as information sources than men do, the raw data show that they nonetheless rely on them substantially.”