With both political parties in the United States courting the "Latino vote," it might be advisable to identify and engage issues that are important to the female element within it.

Christina Bejarano addresses the issue of the Latina vote within the Latino vote in her new book, The Latino Gender Gap in US Politics. Bejerano is an Associate Professor and Undergraduate Director of Political Science at the University of Kentucky.

"My research goal is to incorporate the diverse viewpoints and life experiences of both racial/ethnic minorities and women into mainstream U.S. politics research," Bejarano said in a statement. "I am particularly interested in examining questions of intersectionality of multiple identities, especially the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender."

Her research gives her a front row seat to the political maneuvering currently underway to reach Hispanics.

"Both parties are not quite sure how to successfully court the Latino vote. They just think about it in general, but we need to understand the diversity within Latinos, especially within the women's vote," Bejarano tells George Diepenbrock at phys.org. "We can't just have a general statement of the Latino vote or women's vote without actually trying to figure out what that means."

Bejarano says that in 2012 Obama's margin of support was higher among African American women and Latinas. Those female groups voted for Obama over Mitt Romney by 9 to 11 percentage points more than their male counterparts. White women preferred Obama by 7 points. The disparity between the male and female voters within these groups is a significant political slice. There are marked differences within these sub-sets as well.

"While all of the African American women serving in Congress are Democrats, five of the seven Latinas serving in Congress are Democrats and two are Republicans," notes Political Parity, a non-partisan group that promotes women in political positions. "And the two women of color who grabbed national headlines in 2010 were Republicans: Susana Martinez of New Mexico and Nikki Haley of South Carolina became the first women of color to win gubernatorial office in the United States."

This is a dynamic that Bejarano thinks warrants a closer look, both for the political parties that want to make inroads for the purpose of winning elections and for women, and women of color in particular, to use as a roadmap for engaging in the political process.

One of her goals, according to her faculty statement, is "to outline the conditions under which minorities and women successfully compete for electoral office and how they shape or influence electoral politics."