For a long time, men and women voted in a relatively similar manner in Brazil. This reality began to change with the election that brought Jair Bolsonaro to the Presidency of the Republic in 2018, when men and women began occupying distinct political positions at the polls.
In political science, this transformation is called Modern Gender Gap. The so-called Traditional Gender Gap, according to which women were less politically engaged and more conservative than men, began to give way to this new pattern of differentiated electoral behavior between genders.
Research conducted in the United States and Europe over the past decades shows that women have become more politically participatory, relatively more favorable to equality agendas, and less likely to support far-right populist candidacies.
The central question that guided the research recently published in the book "Wome..." (incomplete publication in the article) was precisely to investigate how the Modern Gender Gap emerges and manifests in the Brazilian context, seeking to understand the specific factors that led to the divergence in voting patterns between men and women in the country.
