Political Views of US Women: Statistics by Age & Race

The overall ideological split

Across all women aged 18-44, self-identified ideology breaks down as 30% conservative, 35% moderate, and 35% liberal. Moderates are the pivotal group: they outnumber either wing among Hispanic women and hold a plurality in several age brackets, which is why party identification (which forces a two-way choice) often looks more polarized than ideology does.

These shares differ visibly from the full adult population, where Gallup's long-running ideology series finds conservatives outnumbering liberals overall. The gap is generational: women under 45 lean several points more liberal than women over 45, and the youngest cohorts lean more liberal still.

Race is the biggest dividing line

Ideological identification varies by race more than by any other standard demographic. Sixty percent of Black women aged 18-44 identify as liberal and only 15% as conservative, a four-to-one ratio. Asian women lean liberal 45% to 20%, while white women are the most evenly split group at 35% conservative, 32% moderate, and 33% liberal.

Hispanic women stand out for their large moderate share at 40%, the highest of any group. Survey researchers at Pew caution that ideological labels map onto policy views differently across groups; a notable share of Black and Hispanic women who identify as moderate or conservative nonetheless vote for Democratic candidates, so ideology and partisanship should not be conflated.

Single women versus married women

Relationship status has become a meaningful political variable in its own right. Validated voter studies and exit polling consistently show unmarried women voting Democratic by wide margins, often 30 or more percentage points, while married women split much more evenly. Ideology follows the same pattern, with never-married women identifying as liberal at rates well above the female average.

The direction of causation runs both ways. Politically liberal women marry later on average, partly through the education channel, while marriage itself is associated with a modest conservative shift in some panel studies. For dating purposes the correlation is what matters: the pool of single women skews more liberal than the female population as a whole, especially in urban areas.

Geography amplifies the pattern. Because single women concentrate in metropolitan areas, and metropolitan areas lean left, a conservative man seeking a conservative single woman in a large coastal city faces a double filter: the single pool skews liberal, and the local population does too. In rural areas the situation reverses, though the absolute number of single women is far smaller.

The widening gender gap among the young

Multiple survey houses have documented an ideological divergence between young women and young men since roughly 2015. Gallup's aggregated data shows women aged 18-29 now identify as liberal at rates around 40%, roughly 15 percentage points above young men, one of the widest gender gaps ever measured in US ideology data.

Related attitude measures move in tandem. YouGov polling finds 28% of American women overall identify as feminists, with higher rates among younger, more educated, and Black women (35%) and lower rates among Asian (22%) and white women (25%). For anyone filtering on political compatibility, these attitude gaps compound the basic ideology split.

Run the numbers yourself

Politics interacts with age, race, education, and marital status simultaneously. The Female Partner Calculator lets you apply an ideology filter alongside those other criteria to see what share of US women matches the full combination, using the survey shares cited here.

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Pew Research Center, Political Typology
• Pew Research Center, Gender Gap in Partisan Identification
• General Social Survey, NORC at the University of Chicago
• YouGov, Feminism Survey Data