People are really complicated.

A couple of very interesting points in The Mother of All Gender Gaps from TheMoneyIllusion.

First there is an opening discussion about definitions regarding how to measure the gap in survey data. Interesting but let's not get distracted.

The substance of the post relates to this news.

A fascinating new national poll from Quinnipiac University shows that men and women disagree markedly on the question of marijuana legalization. While men surveyed strongly favor legalization by a margin of 59 to 36 percent, women oppose it by a clear majority of 52-44 percent. This 15-point gender gap in support for marijuana legalization –let’s call it the “pot gender gap” — is not quite as large as the 20-point gender gap in support for President Obama in the 2012 presidential election, but it is striking. What’s most interesting, though, is how it confounds the expectations set by the voting gender gap. In voting, women trend more liberal and Democratic, while men trend more conservative and Republican. Yet with the pot gender gap, we see women taking the more conservative, law-and-order approach.

To make it a little clearer, 59% of men support the legalization of pot and only 44% of women do so. That is a pretty big gap. The author introduces some other evidence which yields even larger gaps.

That uses the approach I am more familiar with. But by that approach, the drug gap is actually 31%, which makes the drug legalization gender gap far larger than the biggest presidential election gender gap ever recorded. A 31 point gap is mind-boggling by itself, but it’s even more astounding when you consider it reverses the normal liberal/conservative split between men and women. This fact would tell us a lot about politics, if we bothered to pay attention. Instead all you see in the media is endless generalizations about the left and the right, as if the views of African-Americans on social issues, for instance, could be understood simply by noting the fact that they tend to vote Democratic. People are really complicated.

As the author notes, these gaps in opinion on legalizing pot dwarf the comparatively small gaps in left/right voting based on gender.

The rest of the post is speculation about what might drive such a material gap. Interesting.