Gender differences in attitudes towards Brexit

Since the referendum of June 2016, there has been a huge amount of discussion of the demographic breakdown of the vote and current attitudes towards Brexit. This has not been limited to conversations amongst academics but features significantly in the broadcast and print media. It has been important for internal party debates, particularly within the Labour Party, about which direction the leadership should take, and has also featured heavily in the moral discussion of the referendum, be it talk of the vote of the 'left behinds', the more troubling tendency to paint the leave vote as somehow more authentically of the people, or, on the remain side, the significance of the youth vote.

What's striking is one notable absence: gender. This seems like an odd omission, given the well established trend of populist and nativist movements to be male dominated.  I had the impression that there was a significant difference between men and women in attitudes to Brexit, but could not find much in terms of charts, graphs or metadata to confirm or deny this. I remembered that Yougov has a poll tracker of attitudes towards Brexit, which it normally breaks down its responses by gender. The question posed is "In hindsight, do you think Britain was right or wrong to vote to leave the EU? Respondents can answer either 'right', 'wrong', or 'don't know'. I trawled through the last year's worth of data and produced a weighted mean for each result by gender. As the overall picture of attitudes has been relatively stable over this period (though the lead for 'wrong' has increased slightly), this made sense as a time period for measuring differences in current attitudes by gender, rather than changes in attitude over time. All data is given as percentages, weighted by sample size. They are as follows:

	Right	Wrong	Don't Know
Men	43.7	46.7	9.7
Women	37.5	48.3	14.0

Clearly, women tend to have less positive attitudes towards Brexit. The most significant differences are the lower levels of women who say that Brexit was the 'right' choice, and the higher number who say they do not know. When 'don't know' is removed (though perhaps it shouldn't be) the difference in levels of support for right vs wrong becomes more pronounced. They are as follows:

	Right	Wrong
Men	48.4	51.6
Women	43.7	56.3

For those interested, the raw data used is produced below. I've tried to find every single Yougov poll done in the last year, but there are a couple of omissions, either because I've been unable to find the polling data or because it is not broken down by gender.

Date	Men right	Men wrong	Men DK	Women right	Women wrong	Women DK	Sample Size
23 July 2018 / YouGov	47	43	11	38	49	13	1650
9 August 2018 / YouGov	45	45	10	38	46	16	1036
13 August 2018 / NC	45	44	10	41	46	12	1660
21 August 2018 / YouGov	45	45	10	37	50	13	1697
29 August 2018 / YouGov	45	47	8	39	47	14	1664
4 September 2018 / YouGov	43	48	9	41	47	12	1883
13 September 2018 / YouGov	44	48	8	37	48	15	1620
19 September 2018 / YouGov	45	46	9	36	49	15	2509
1 October 2018 / YouGov	44	47	9	40	46	13	1607
9 October 2018 / YouGov	44	45	12	36	49	15	1647
15 October 2018 / YouGov	43	44	13	41	46	13	1649
23 October 2018 / YouGov	46	45	9	37	48	15	1802
5 November 2018 / YouGov	46	43	11	36	48	16	1637
27 November 2018 / YouGov	44	48	8	39	48	13	1737
4 December 2018 / YouGov	40	50	10	35	48	16	1624
14 December 2018 / YouGov	45	46	9	37	48	14	5043
4 January 2019 / YouGov	43	47	10	37	49	14	25537
7 January 2019 / YouGov	43	46	11	36	51	13	1656
14 January 2019 / YouGov	42	49	9	39	47	14	1701
4 February 2019 / YouGov	43	47	10	36	49	16	1851
23 February 2019 / YouGov	42	47	11	37	48	14	1672
15 March 2019 / YouGov	43	50	7	39	48	14	1823
25 March 2019 / YouGov	43	48	9	38	48	14	2110
3 April 2019 / YouGov	43	47	10	41	46	13	1771
11 April 2019 / YouGov	44	48	8	38	48	13	1843
3 July 2019 / YouGov	45	47	8	37	48	14	1605
17 July 2019 / YouGov	46	45	10	35	50	15	1749
Weighted Mean	43.71562555	46.65833593	9.671929848	37.50304271	48.33015735	14.01256387	73783

* Number Cruncher Politics