Lois Duke Whitaker's edited volume is a supplemental textbook that is ideally suited for undergraduate courses on women and politics, but could be used for other courses as well. Although a variety of methods are used throughout the book, the authors make efforts to discuss their approaches and findings, and so undergraduates should be able to understand the research. The book also offers the needed background and history on many of the key issues related to gender and elections. Although many of the chapters define the gender gap in voting as the difference in voting for a Democrat versus a Republican candidate, other gender gaps in voting are examined as well.

The scope of the book is broader than voting. Many of the chapters discuss a variety of gender gaps, such as gaps in participation and attitudes. The first chapter, “The History of the Gender Gaps” by Barbara Norrander, focuses on the gender gap in issue preferences. It describes the basic gender differences in issue positions over the past 20–50 years, depending on the issue, and offers some reasoning for the difference.

The second chapter, “Women and the Polls: Questions, Answers, Images” by Kathleen A. Frankovic, offers unique research examining gender differences among those who conduct polls, and it introduces the contention that the questions pollsters ask about women reflect elite gender biases. Frankovic also offers important historical background about gender and polling.

Several chapters examine the factors that contribute to gender gaps. Laurel Elder and Steven Greene examine how parenthood affects political attitudes and voting as a means for testing theories of whether and how “motherhood” contributes to the gender gap. For example, does having a nurturing role as a parent increase support for compassion issues? They find that being a parent and, more importantly, being an active parent affects views on education, government spending, health care, and gay marriage. And although parenthood affects mothers and fathers, its effects are significantly stronger for mothers.

Leonie Huddy, Erin Cassese, and Mary-Kate Lizotte's chapter, “Sources of Political Unity and Disunity among Women: Placing the Gender Gap in Perspective,” examines whether shared economic interests help explain the gender gap by investigating whether it exists within different economic and social demographic group pairings. The authors find that differences in economic interests do not explain the gap.

Other authors examine how contextual factors might affect the size of the gap in a given year. In “The Reemergence of the Gender Gap in 2004,” Cal Clark and Janet Clark ask why the gender gap was smaller in 2002 than in earlier elections or in 2004. Their initial explanation is that the culture wars and the preeminence of security issues caused cross-pressures in 2002 that were unique to that election. Their findings suggest that security issues depressed the gender gap in 2002, and the decline in the importance of security issues by the 2004 elections allowed the gender gap to rebound to typical levels.

Susan Carroll's chapter, “Security Moms and Presidential Politics: Women Voters in the 2004 Elections,” challenges the popular assertion that moms concerned about security issues voted disproportionally for Republican candidates in 2004. Additionally, Carroll suggests that this frame affected the debates during the electoral cycle and aided Republican candidates. Both the chapters by Clark and Clark and by Carroll concentrate on the 2004 election cycle; however, the implications of their findings are broader.

Margie Omero, in “Using Exit Polls to Explore the Gender Gap in Campaigns for Senate and Governor,” examines how context affects the gender gap in voting by exploring how the gender and party of the candidates affect the nature of the gap. She finds that female senatorial candidates are not more successful than gubernatorial candidates, that the gender gap is larger in Democratic environments, that the size of the gender gap is not affected by the competitiveness of a race, and that Democratic women are more successful than other candidates.

The book also offers chapters that examine gender gaps in voting other than the gap in party support. In “Women Voters, Women Candidates: Is there a Gender Gap in Support for Women Candidates?” Kathleen Dolan explores variations in women's responses to survey questions about women candidates in order to argue that women are not dramatically more likely to support a female candidate than are men, although the context of the election matters.

M. Margaret Conway's chapter, “The Gender Gap: A Comparison across Racial and Ethnic Groups,” uses various data sources to examine whether different gender gaps (participation levels, party, attitudes, and issues) exist across different racial/ethnic populations. The author finds that the gender gap varies to some extent across time, racial/ethnic groups, and types of gaps. For example, although white, Hispanic, and Native American women are more likely to be Democrats than are their male counterparts, no difference exists in the party identification of African Americans and Asian Americans.

The chapters do not all fit together to create a general theory of the gender gap, but that is not the intent, which is to offer a supplemental text that updates and expands on the literature on the gender gap. The book offers students several ways to think about various gender gaps, what they mean for politics, what might cause them, what might affect their size, and so on. The editor does leave out a couple of interesting questions: how the gap works on lower-level offices, and its effects on campaign strategies and outcomes. However, the concluding chapter by Whitaker addresses whether the gender gap can empower women to have a significant effect in policy.

I recommend that anyone teaching an undergraduate course on women and politics consider adopting Voting the Gender Gap. It offers a variety of approaches and types of questions and examines different gaps that instructors can use to inform students about how politics is affected by the many aspects of gender. The book is also written at a level that makes the research accessible to undergraduate students.