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Public Opinion Quarterly Advance Access originally published online on May 28, 2009
Public Opinion Quarterly 2009 73(2):233-254; doi:10.1093/poq/nfp019
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Predictors of Public Support for Gender-Related Affirmative Action

Interests, Gender Attitudes, and Stratification Beliefs

Emily W. Kane and Kimberly J. Whipkey

Address correspondence to Emily W. Kane; e-mail: ekane{at}bates.edu.

Drawing on data from the General Social Survey during the period from 1996 through 2006, we explore predictors of support for gender-related affirmative action in the United States. Following the literature on race-based affirmative action, we identify three main domains of predictors, each of which also resonates well with themes within scholarship on gender: interests; gender-related attitudes; and general stratification beliefs. In multivariate analyses, at least some predictors within each domain are significant. We conclude that like support for race-based affirmative action, support for gender-based affirmative action is based on a combination of interests, gender attitudes, and general stratification beliefs, but that gender attitudes are less important in shaping such support than racial beliefs are in shaping support for race-based affirmative action. The implications of these findings for the literature on race-related affirmative action as well as for the literature on gender-related attitudes are considered.

EMILY W. KANE AND KIMBERLY J. WHIPKEY are with the Department of Sociology, Bates College, 269 Pettengill Hall, Lewiston ME 04240, USA. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2006 Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society in Boston, MA. We are grateful to the Bates College Summer Research Apprenticeship Program, which provided support for the second author's work on this project.


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