Methodology
What exactly were we measuring? We tracked mentions of two major issues in work-family justice: childcare and paid family and medical leave. We also tracked issues related to gender justice in the workplace: gender discrimination (manifested as the gender pay gap), and gender-based harassment. These policy topics parallel our candidate tracking snapshot. Throughout our analysis, we will refer to work-family and gender workplace justice policy issues using the short-hand, gender-work-family policy issues.
Using transcripts available online, we tracked mentions at the following 10 debates:
June 26-27, 2019: Debate 1 (Miami, Florida)
July 30-31, 2019: Debate 2 (Detroit, Michigan)
September 12, 2019: Debate 3 (Houston, Texas)
October 15, 2019: Debate 4 ( Westerville, Ohio)
November 20, 2019: Debate 5 (Atlanta, Georgia)
December 19, 2019: Debate 6 (Los Angeles, California)
January 14, 2020: Debate 7 (Des Moines, Iowa)
February 7, 2020: Debate 8 (Manchester, New Hampshire)
February 19, 2020: Debate 9 (Las Vegas, Nevada)
February 25, 2020: Debate 10 (Charleston, South Carolina)
Who were we interested in? Moderators and candidates. To a large extent, candidates’ own comments were limited by the questions moderators asked them. That’s why every time a topic was raised by a moderator, we tallied it as a mention. Even if the same question was posed to different candidates, each iteration was still counted as an individual mention. Similarly, every time a candidate raised an issue, either in response to a question directly about one of the four issues, or in response to a question that wasn’t about one of the four issue areas, we counted it as a mention.
We omitted a number of candidates in this analysis because they had no mentions throughout the debates–either because they were not asked about the issues or in the absence of direct questions, did not raise the issues themselves. Consequently, their inclusion would not change the outcome of the findings nor provide content for in-depth analysis.
To illustrate the significance of our findings, we compared the number of times candidates and moderators mentioned college affordability to the number of times they discussed gender-work-family policies on the debate stage. We chose to track college affordability as a baseline for comparison because it is part of the discourse around economic opportunity, social mobility, and financial security—similar to childcare, paid family and medical leave, equal pay, and workplace harassment. Furthermore, college affordability has been seen as more gender neutral and less family-oriented than the issues we tracked.
In addition to counting the number of times candidates and moderators mentioned issues, we also analyzed the substance of all candidate responses, labeling them non-substantive or substantive. To qualify as substantive, comments met at least one of the following criteria: referenced facts or figures, discussed strategies for implementation, incorporated personal anecdotes, or sparked further conversations between candidates.