How does party support for gender equality in the labour market affect the gender voting gap? A well-established argument from the literature on gender and political behaviour states that working women tend to vote for left-wing parties more than men because they are stronger supporters of the welfare state. However, no study has assessed whether parties’ welfare positions affect the gender voting gap. Leveraging three decades of public opinion data from sixteen Western democracies, I provide evidence in support of that claim: increases in women’s labour force participation are associated with higher female/male voter ratios for the left, but only when those parties strongly support gender-egalitarian policies in the labour market. These findings confirm and add nuance to the previous understanding of the gap: by focusing on public opinion, previous research overlooked party behaviour. Therefore, my evidence elevates the importance of party strategy in explaining gender differences in voting.
