Men are likelier than women to approve of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's Cabinet, with the percentage-point gender gap being the widest ever seen for any cabinet inaugurated after March 1978, according to data based on monthly nationwide surveys conducted by The Yomiuri Shimbun.
The data also shows that young people's support rate for the Abe Cabinet is higher than that of the older generations.
According to the data, the average approval rating for Abe's Cabinet across ages and genders has been 55 percent over the period from the inauguration of his second Cabinet in December 2012 until July this year.
The Abe Cabinet's support rate ranks third, only exceeded by 67 percent for the Cabinet of Morihiro Hosokawa (1993-94) and 56 percent for the Cabinet of Junichiro Koizumi (2001-06), among all cabinets inaugurated after March 1978, when The Yomiuri's surveys started.
The Cabinet of Masayoshi Ohira, inaugurated in December 1978, was the first to be fully covered by the surveys.
By gender, the approval figure for men -- an average of numbers obtained by subtracting the disapproval rating for the Abe Cabinet from the approval rating in each survey -- is 10.6 percentage points higher than that for women. Support by men exceeded support by women by the largest margin since the survey began on approval ratings for cabinets.
The difference by gender is likely to stem from higher evaluation by men of such Abe Cabinet policies as diplomacy and security.
By age, the average approval rating of people aged 18 to 29 is the highest at 61 percent. The lowest is 50 percent among those in their 60s.
Many previous cabinets gained high support rates from elderly people. The Abe Cabinet is the first cabinet to obtain the highest support rate from young people.
The Yomiuri Shimbun had conducted a total of 502 such surveys by July, at least once in a month, to learn about such matters as the approval and disapproval of the Cabinet.
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