Title: Poll: Few Identify As Feminists, But Most Believe In Equality Of Sexes | HuffPost
Headings: Poll: Few Identify As Feminists, But Most Believe In Equality Of Sexes
Poll: Few Identify As Feminists, But Most Believe In Equality Of Sexes
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Content: Another 8 percent consider themselves anti-feminists, while 63 percent said they are neither. Download
Broken down by party, 32 percent of Democrats, 19 percent of independents and only 5 percent of Republicans said they are feminists. But asked if they believe that “men and women should be social, political, and economic equals,” 82 percent of the survey respondents said they did, and just 9 percent said they did not. Equal percentages of men and women said they agreed with that statement, along with 87 percent of Democrats, 81 percent of independents and 76 percent of Republicans. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines feminism as “the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes.” The gulf between the percentage of people who identify as feminists and the percentage who believe in the equality of the sexes may be partly due to a branding problem for the word “feminism.” Thirty-seven percent said they consider “feminist” to be a negative term, compared to only 26 percent who consider it a positive term. Twenty-nine percent said it’s a neutral term. Among Republicans, 58 percent said the term is mostly negative, compared to 40 percent of independents and 20 percent of Democrats. Men were also more likely than women to consider “feminist” a negative term (42 percent to 32 percent), but even among women, more said the term is negative than positive (32 percent to 29 percent).