What "demands" do respondents think of when responding to the statement "Feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men"?

The 2018 Cooperative Congressional Election Survey included two items labeled as measures of "sexism", for which respondents received five response options from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree". One of these sexism measures is the Glick and Fiske 1996 hostile sexism statement that "Feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men". This item was recently used in the forthcoming Schaffner 2020 article in the British Journal of Political Science.

It is not clear to me what "demands" the statement refers to. Moreover, it seems plausible that Democrats would conceptualize these demands differently than Republicans do so that, in effect, many Democrats would respond to a different item than many Republicans respond to. Democrats might be more likely to conceptualize reasonable demands such as support for equal work for equal pay, but Republicans might be more likely to conceptualize more disputable demands such as support for taxpayer-funded late-term abortions.

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To assess whether CCES 2018 respondents were thinking only of the reasonable demand of men's support for equal work for equal pay, let's check data for the 2016 American National Election Studies Time Series Study, which asked post-election survey participants to respond to the item: "Do you favor, oppose, or neither favor nor oppose requiring employers to pay women and men the same amount for the same work?".

In weighted ANES 2016 data, 87% of participants asked that item favored requiring employers to pay women and men the same amount for the same work, including non-substantive responses, with a 95% confidence interval of [86%, 89%]. However, in weighted CCES 2018 post-election data, only 38% of participants somewhat or strongly agreed that feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men, including non-substantive responses, with a 95% confidence interval of [37%, 39%].

So, in these weighted national samples, 87% favored requiring employers to pay women and men the same amount for the same work, but only 38% agreed that feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men. I think that this is strong evidence that a large percentage of U.S. adults do not think of only reasonable demands when responding to the statement that "Feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men".

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To address the concern that the interpretation of the "demands" differs by partisanship, here are support levels by partisan identification:

Democrats

• 92% favor requiring employers to pay women and men the same amount for the same work [2016 ANES]
• 59% agree that feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men [2018 CCES]
• 33 percentage-point difference

Republicans

• 84% favor requiring employers to pay women and men the same amount for the same work [2016 ANES]
• 18% agree that feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men [2018 CCES]
• 66 percentage-point difference

So that's an 8-point Democrat/Republican gap in favoring requiring employers to pay women and men the same amount for the same work, but a 41-point Democrat/Republican gap in agreement that feminists are making entirely reasonable demands of men.

I think that this is at least suggestive evidence that a nontrivial percentage of Democrats and an even higher percentage of Republicans are not thinking of reasonable feminist demands such as support for equal work for equal pay. If it is generally true that, responding to the "feminist demands" item, Democrats on average think of different demands than Republicans think of, that seems like a poor research design, to infer sexism in politically relevant variables based on a too-vague item that different political groups interpret differently.

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NOTES:

1. ANES 2016 citations:

The American National Election Studies (ANES). 2016. ANES 2012 Time Series Study. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2016-05-17. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR35157.v1.

ANES. 2017. "User's Guide and Codebook for the ANES 2016 Time Series Study". Ann Arbor, MI, and Palo Alto, CA: The University of Michigan and Stanford University.

2. CCES 2018 citation:

Stephen Ansolabehere, Brian F. Schaffner, and Sam Luks. Cooperative Congressional Election Study, 2018: Common Content. [Computer File] Release 2: August 28, 2019. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University [producer] http://cces.gov.harvard.edu.

3. ANES 2016 Stata code:

tab V162149

tab V160502

keep if V160502==1

tab V162149

gen favorEQpay = V162149

recode favorEQpay (-9 -8 2 3=0)

tab V162149 favorEQpay, mi

svyset [pweight=V160102], strata(V160201) psu(V160202)

svy: prop favorEQpay

tab V161155

svy: prop favorEQpay if V161155==1

svy: prop favorEQpay if V161155==2

4. CCES 2018 Stata code:

tab CC18_422d tookpost, mi

tab CC18_422d tookpost, mi nol

keep if tookpost==2

tab CC18_422d, mi

gen femagree = CC18_422d

recode femagree (3/5 .=0) (1/2=1)

tab CC18_422d femagree, mi

svyset [pw=commonpostweight]

svy: prop femagree

tab CC18_421a

svy: prop femagree if CC18_421a==1

svy: prop femagree if CC18_421a==2