Gender and Speaker Volubility in Congressional Hearings

• In Event: Gender and Legislative Politics

Abstract

We examine speech patterns during more than 25,000 committee hearings in the
United States Congress from 1994 to 2018. This project is an extension of ongoing work, in which we find consistent evidence that women are more likely to experience interruptions when they are speaking in committee hearings, with especially strong effects among members.

In this paper, we will extend this inquiry to volubility--the amount of time/number of words devoted to speaking on a given topic. There is reason to believe that men will display more volubility than women overall, but as we have done in our previous work on interruptions, we hope to provide crucial context in an effort to more fully illuminate the conditions under which women and men speak more often in Congress. We believe committee hearings are important not because of their more conversational (compared to a floor speech) nature, but also because Congress does most of its work in committee. If, as some work suggests, women advocate for women's issues and are effective representatives of women, it is worth comparing the volubility of men and women across a range of committees, issues, and dyads. This work therefore has implications for legislative behavior and representation.

We will engage the following questions:
1. Are women less voluble than men?
2. Do gender differences in volubility depend on the policy being discussed? That is, are women more voluble advocates on so-called "women's issues?"
3. What effect does seniority have on gendered differences in volubility? For instance, while men may talk over women who are new to the chamber, it is possible that women shift strategies to mitigate this problem as they gain experience (we find evidence for this with respect to interruptions.)
4. Do partisan dynamics affect volubility? That is, do people speak more (or less) when they are addressing "friendly" witnesses?

We have already collected and analyzed the committee transcripts--though we have not yet conducted any analysis on volubility. That said, we believe this work will be easily executed in the time frame, and we hope you will consider it for the program.

Authors

• Michael G. Miller, Barnard College

• Joseph Sutherland, Columbia University