I'm guessing that since the research was done in conjunction with MORI, Moistenedbint1, they used whatever industry-standard devices are always used by professional pollsters to eliminate that sort of bias in their sample? In any case, the poll itself wasn't conducted by MN, I think, just the qualitative, focus group element?
I keep pondering this question:
Given that women are systematically disadvantaged in society and in the political process, it makes sense that a primary political identity for women is as women -- it should have a salience that the identity "man" lacks because it defines a group whose disadvantage is the proper target for political action. Viewing ourselves as women, and being viewed as such by political parties is the right thing to do, because it make disadvantage visible. So why do I feel so alienated when the Tories and the LibDems look at me as "a woman voter" as part of their project of addressing the "woman problem" that this research seems to reveal?
It's an issue across the board for any disadvantaged group: You have to embrace the identity under which you are disadvantaged, in order to campaign for change and in order to assert pride and pleasure in an identity that you have been taught to denigrate, but in doing so you risk reinforcing your place in a ghetto and your status as the other.
That is an unavoidable tension, and I suppose I just don't trust a bunch of men to deal with that tension properly -- especially after that episode in which some of the few women in the LibDems' corridors of small power faced being groped on the way in and out of the meetings in which they served as fig leaves for the sheer maleness of party politics.
In principle, being targetted as women voters could be liberating and progressive, but in practice it is just ghettoizing, othering when it is undertaken by such a woman-excluding bunch. The LibDems Great School Uniform Initiative the other day reminds me of that old Carlsberg advert where a bunch of men load up a truck with lager and then proudly hold up a bottle of naff sherry as "something for the ladies." (They then have to unload the sherry because the overloaded truck tips over -- a perfect image for the way in which women have suffered more than men from the truck-unloading of austerity politics.)
A related problem is that the political parties, unlike special issue groups, are supposed to aggregate our various political identities, and to aggregate a range of political concerns under a coherent political philosophy. But they seem increasingly to lack any integrated approach. Policies don't stem from substantial core ideals, they are piecemeal, a response to the imperatives of getting elected. Parties throw out enticements to various demographics without a guiding philosophy. So the identities they cater to are fragmented, and the bribed identity "woman" doesn't stand much chance of being integrated into an overarching, unmarginalised political identity.