Why 2024 is America’s most gendered election in history

With just days to go before voting day on November 5, both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris made an open pitch to women.

On Wednesday in Wisconsin, one of the key swing states, Trump made a Hail Mary promise to protect women, “whether women like it or not”. Kamala Harris immediately seized on the comment as offensive to women by denying them autonomy. “He simply does not respect the freedom of women or the intelligence of women to know what’s in their own best interest and make decisions accordingly,” she said at an election rally in Arizona, another swing state.

The pitch and counter-pitch are easy to understand. Political pundits are calling this the “most gendered election” where women will play a decisive role in deciding who will be America’s next president.

Early voting patterns reveal that women are outnumbering men, in key states by as much as 10 percentage points, finds Politico. It’s giving anxious Democrats “newfound hope” in a campaign where gender has been the defining issue and where analysts find more women rooting for Harris with Trump having the edge over men.

A win for Harris will reverberate across the world where women’s political leadership has more or less stagnated with just 0.4% growth in 2023 over the previous year and where gender equality has declined or remained the same in 40% of countries, according to Equal Measures 2030.