Detachment trumps dogma
Last night The World Tonight interviewed Professor Andrew Oswald of Warwick University, who has found that having daughters makes you more likely to vote for a more left wing party. He discovered this by interviewing about 25,000 people in the UK and Germany over 13 years. An unusual result found through unambiguous methods. You would have thought.
But not for Cathy Newman, chief political correspondent of the FT, who was interviewed alongside Professor Oswald. For her it’s “a load of rubbish” and “gender stereotyping”. She wonders if it is “just another way of saying women are softer than men” and suggests that “it’s like opinion polls; you get the answer you’re looking for”.
Cathy Newman does not come out of the interview looking good. The study does not stereotype women, because it does not look at the political beliefs of women — it looks at the political beliefs of parents, who will be men and women. And it’s hard to see how Professor Oswald might have “got the answer [he was] looking for” after his explanation that “we factor out, in the jargon, let’s say 40 or 50 other influences such as education and income and so on”. She doesn’t seem to have thought about this very carefully at all; if anyone’s maintaining a stereotype it’s her, maintaining the stereotype of the blinkered, opinionated hack.
The professor, meanwhile, does very well, by utterly failing to address Cathy Newman directly and instead he speaks only to the interviewer. He’s also obviously very cautious in his statements: he says he can’t be sure the gender of the child is the cause of the voting shift but “what other explanation would you have for this? There’s a very strong statistical pattern: the gender of the baby goes first, then the voter changes his or her preferences.”
Michael White in the Guardian summarises why it might be happening:
- women are increasingly aware of pay discrimination in the workplace, where, better educated and experienced, they play a growing role.
- women “derive greater marginal utility from public goods like community safety”.
In other words, the practical problems that women find in the world influence those near them to prefer parties who are more likely to help them.
It’s a shame Cathy Newman, another newspaper journalist, felt the need to take a position rather than considering the case carefully. I don’t know if this is a failing of The World Tonight, trying to create an argument where none existed, or the failing of Cathy Newman herself. Either way, she’s just another of today’s victims of opinion over objectivity.
