Abstract
European women first acquired the right to vote in 1906 in Finland. After the First World War, women were given the right to vote in a certain number of European countries. In the UK, it was gained in two stages: first in 1918, it was initially given to married women, women householders and women university graduates aged thirty years or over. In France, General de Gaulle gave the right to vote to women by decree in 1944, after the Senate had blocked proposals aimed at enfranchising French women several times. Many hoped, and others feared that women would vote as a bloc, creating thus a distinctive "women's vote". During the post-war era, it was established in political science that women proved more rightwing than men. The "gender gap" is a rather large phrase that can be used to refer to different phenomena, including divergences between men and women in turnout, political attitudes, social values, party identification and policy concerns. Concretely, we will focus on the difference in voting choice, which is certainly the most common usage. There can be divergences of behaviour between genders concerning a given issue or candidate. Gender may have a direct effect (for instance, if genders differ on their vision of ecology, this can influence their choice for Green parties), or an indirect effect on voting behaviour (lifestyles for example can make the voting choices diverge). It is not a fixed phenomenon, and the "gender gap" has constantly moved, according to eras and countries. For instance, the trend is completely inversed in countries such as Netherlands, where women have always been more left-wing than men. But we decided to focus on western European countries, as it's obvious that the gender gap is linked to culture.
