ARTICLE Rethinking Women’s Interests: An Inductive and Intersectional Approach to Defining Women’s Policy Priorities Tevfik Murat Yildirim Department of Media and Social Sciences, University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway Corresponding author. E-mail: murat.yildirim@uis.no (Received 16 February 2020; revised 21 April 2021; accepted 7 May 2021; first published online 25 August 2021) Much of the vast literature on the substantive representation of women takes as its point of departure important a priori assumptions about the nature of women as a group. Calling for a rethink of many of those assumptions, a recent body of work recommends an inductive approach to defining women’s interests. In line with this view, this article draws on a recently constructed dataset that codes nearly a million Americans’ policy priorities over the past 75 years to explore what constitutes women’s interests and whether gender differences in priorities cut across partisan and racial divisions. The results suggest there are consistent gender gaps across a large number of policy categories, with women showing particu- lar concern for policy areas traditionally associated with issues of ‘women’s interests’. While in many pol- icy areas women were more likely to share policy priorities with other women than with their male counterparts of the same race or partisan background, the results also document considerable heterogen- eity among women in various policy areas, which has major policy implications for the representation of women’s interests. Keywords: women’s substantive representation; gender; race; partisanship; intersectionality; policy priorities; most important problems; USA A large strand of research in gender and politics has long focused on the substantive representa- tion of women since Pitkin’s(1967) seminal work on representation. A growing body of research delves further into the conditionality of (and assumptions related to) the substantive representa- tion of women in legislatures (Childs 2004; Celis et al. 2014; Celis and Childs 2008; Childs and Krook 2009; Celis and Childs 2020). The bulk of this scholarly work emphasizes the inevitable necessity to rethink some important a priori assumptions about the nature of women as a group (Reingold and Swers 2011) – primarily the assumption that there are ‘issues’ or ‘interests’ that all women, both in legislatures and within the mass public, share in common. However, scholars have yet to reach a consensus on how to objectively define ‘women’s interests’ and whether distinct subgroups of women prioritize a common set of issues, despite its centrality to the study of women’s representation. This lack of consensus on defining ‘women’s interests’ arguably stems mainly from scholars’ increasing willingness to ‘undertake empirical studies sensitive to “creative” accounts of representa- tion, which simultaneously recognize diversity among women, …given that women in society hold different views and a wide array of actors…make claims on behalf of “women” as a group’ (Celis et al. 2014, 151). Indeed, although women’s shared experiences likely result in commonalities in their per- ceived priorities (Mansbridge 1999; Philips 1995; Sapiro 1981), gender’s intersection with race, class and partisanship necessitates the recognition of women’s heterogeneity as a group (Huddy, Cassese and Lizotte 2008; Smooth 2011; Celis and Childs 2020). Therefore group interests must be cautiously © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. British Journal of Political Science (2022), 52, 1240–1257 doi:10.1017/S0007123421000235 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123421000235 Published online by Cambridge University Press