The problem of libertarianism and women

Though Peter Thiel's libertarian bildungsroman is interesting on its own terms, it's mostly attracted attention for a questionable remark about women. I confess I followed a neutral link from Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution that didn't mention the gender issue, and I didn't even notice the offending line until I came across Will Wilkinson post on the topic later today.

Jason Kuznicki's response up at the Cato blog -- in which he points out that Thiel meant to note only that women have traditionally supported non-libertarian policies, not that women are inherently incapable of making good decisions in the voting booth -- resolves the issue. And, like Thiel, I'm not entirely comfortable with democratic capitalism either. One of the central insight of public choice theory is that both men and women often have every incentive to behave irrationally in the voting booth. I tend to think that these problems can nonetheless be solved by powerful constraints on government power, such as a liberal constitution enforced by an appropriately active court system. I recognize I'm alienating plenty of my conservative brethren by saying so, which highlights just how difficult it is to design a system that does this well. Thus all the obnoxiously tentative language in this paragraph.

Finally, as a libertarian advocate, I don't know how to solve the problem of libertarianism and women. Heaven knows, I get asked this question frequently enough at both seminar-style discussions and cocktail parties. I am in some sense the wrong person to ask: Iibertarian ideas don't repulse me and never have, so how would I know why they repulse other women? Furthermore, I find most of the usual hypotheses to explain why more women aren't libertarian deeply off-putting. That is, I don't want to believe that women aren't libertarian because libertarianism is intellectual and rational and women are less rational than men, or some much. I have a vested personal interest in not believing that I became a token libertarian only because some profoundly unfeminine Vulcan streak mars my soul. Maybe that makes me and other women like me less effective at reaching out to the sisterhood than we could be, though, which is unfortunate. Suggestions on how it can be tackled are welcome.