interesting -- and nobody has a louder voice than cash...

Is there a dearth of research on this? Serious question -- I really don't know. I'd be sort of surprised if no-one had had a look at it.

I can tell you as a single data point (and we all know that the singular of "data" is "anecdote") that in our household, my girlfriend and I pool it all. And she has more direct control of the purse strings than I do.

I don't know that there's much solid research on this. All I know is a lot of anecdotal crap about women saying that they might as well not work b/c "their" income only goes to pay for daycare, so it's a wash. Also that this argument was used in bitching about the "marriage penalty" as a political issue, and it seriously chapped my hide.

Women aren't nearly as interested in politics as men. There are exceptions and activists but on the whole, and MANY studies have shown this, women aren't as interested until later in life say--mid 40's and above. I'm not being sexist. I was in marketing and adverising for a long time and every year reports said the same thing. Granted, politics these days alienates both sexes with rampant corruption and just plain stupid decisions.

Right. But that doesn't tell us whether the income is fungible or not, which is your issue.

Hypothetically, the household income in a totally pooled setting (like mine) might only rise enough when she enters the workforce to cover the costs of daycare, which would enable her to say "My income barely covers the daycare" -- this doesn't speak to how household incomes are partitioned (or not) according to who earns them, only that the net effect is basically zero.

I mean anecdotally, I could imagine m/f/ partnerships/households where the "husband" doles out money according to his rules, ones where the "wife" controls what gets spent on what, and gives hubby some spending money for his poker game, and others where it's pooled, or where the decision-making about allocation is based on mutual agreement.

More data here would be interesting to have, but hard to collect in a way that sheds a lot of light. (That's pretty much inevitable.) Even if a household reports that the wife's income is directly spent on daycare, that in and of itself tells us nothing about the actual decision-making process that led to that.

it seems to me that the sheer volume of money coming from institutions and wealthy old men would make it hard to guess how family budgeting factors into the whole equation. i think your average household is a drop in the campaign bucket compared to Big Money. in order for that 25% figure to be useful in that sense, 100% of campaign contributions would have to come from situations that fit the profile you're trying to examine.

also, why give money to "female candidates" instead of just the candidate you believe in? that sounds dangerously like the feminist-acting-against-true-equality backswing.

I guess there's not a great way to quantify "interest" in politics, but in fact, according to a report by the Rutgers' Center for American Women and Politics (The Gender Gap and the 2004 Women's Vote, Setting the Record Straight) women vote in higher numbers than men and have done so in every national election since 1964. In 2000, 7.8 million more women voted than men did.

In addition, women have voted at higher RATES than men since 1980. In 2000, 56.2% of registered women voters went to the polls, compared to 53.1% of men voters.

SOURCE (it's a PDF)

That said, I personally would never give money to/vote for a female candidate just because we both have ovaries. All things being equal, maybe I would favor a female candidate over an identical male candidate, but all things are NEVER equal, so I tend to leave gender out of the equation.

I dunno how economists feel about survey data - but I don't see why we just couldn't survey people on who makes financial decisions in the home? I imagine a pretty nice little scale from -1 (the husband makes all the choices) to 0 (equal decision making) to +1 (the woman makes most of the decisions). I guess that raises some questions for non-hetero situations - but I could imagine follow up questions that would get around some of that and also act as corroborating evidence (is financial decision making equal among parters or is decision making weighted based on how much each person earns; do you control your own finances or are they pooled etc). I'd be pretty satisfied with data like that for a first cut. But I'm a lazy political scientist.

Gimme a break. I addressed this issue SPECIFICALLY in the post.

I think the problem with this is obvious: people are notorious for false self-reporting. And when you put gender in the mix, it's even worse; there are all sorts of problems with perceptions that equality for women is "against true equality" or that people "leave gender out of the question" when it's very clear by looking across populations that that's bunk.

I think to do it right you'd have to focus not on who 'controls' spending, but on how people talk about their incomes, why they work, and so on.

I agree that's one of the big potential problems with this approach.

That being said, for this kind of broad question/issue, some kind of targetted "Likert scale" kind of questioning seems the way to go. But wording it to tease out the kind of stuff you're interested in is the real challenge.

Another single data-point for contrast is a good friend of my gf's. She semi-recently met a guy, moved cities to be near him, but they lived separately for a while. (He was divorced, had a young daughter.) They've recently moved in together, but they still do all their finances separately.

Whereas the moment I moved in with TheFuckOffGirl, whooooooosh! All male autonomy gone.

actually you didn't. you addressed a similar idea, but you still advocated acting based on gender instead of skill or charisma and in typical Bitch fashion, you wrapped it in a pointlessly extreme example.

but whatever, fine, you're right. i'd rather go to bed than put any real effort into this reply.

Not really. In order for that to be true, you'd need to give a good reason to do so. Voting and supporting somebody solely because they're a woman is no better than refusing to vote for them because they're a woman.

There is an art and science to doing a survey that correctly assesses the situation. Gallop polls and other reputable ones spend a lot of effort to perform a good survey. When I was in school I know that there were whole classes on research methods in political science. I don't know about this survey but if its done properly then its interesting. If it wasn't done properly then why even care?

BZZT. Illogic alert. Given that at the moment women are 16% of the elected members of the U.S. Congress, and that no woman has ever served as President or VP, clearly voting for women on the basis of gender is actually *not* analogous to refusing to do so.