Gendered Communication and Women's Political Careers in 19 Democracies

• In Event: Political Elites and Political Careers

Abstract

Women politicians face a paradox when acting in parliament: on the one hand, substantively representing women pushes women who are members of parliament (MPs) to have a more gendered style and to sometimes focus their activity on so-called ``women's issues'', such as education and healthcare. On the other hand, many voters have a gendered perception of politics, and have harsher evaluations of women politicians. Furthermore, research on organizational behavior has shown that women who progress to higher positions in a hierarchy typically dominated by men tend to adopt more stereotypically masculine traits. In that case, having a markedly gendered style can lead to slower career progression of women politicians. Previous research shows that conservative politicians who are women might have a particularly strong incentive to emulate their male colleagues rather than differentiating themselves based on their gender identity. We investigate how these contradictory incentives have influenced women's parliamentary trajectories in nineteen democracies of Europe (East and West), North America, and Oceania between 1987 and 2020. We have used different sources to collect more than 11 million parliamentary speeches from those countries within this time frame, and we have applied machine learning models to predict, purely based on text, whether each speech was given by a woman or a man. The predictive accuracy is taken to represent the degree of genderedness of the speech and respective legislator: when the classifier has a high certainty that a speech was given by a woman, it is an indication that the speech contains more feminine gendered language. Subsequently, we investigate the relationship between discourse genderedness and women's progression in parliament over time, more specifically the relationship with how long they stay in parliament, and if and how they rise through party ranks by getting more prestigious assignments, such as committee memberships and chairwomanships, party leadership, and cabinet positions, understanding parliaments as gendered workplaces. Preliminary findings suggest that women MPs have a less distinctively feminine voice the longer they stay in parliament, and that joining the cabinet erases much of the difference in speaking style between men and women MPs. This research helps us understand the individual incentives that shape how women represent women in parliament and the institutional structures that influence this relationship.

Authors

• Jens Wäckerle, University of Cologne

• Danielle Pullan, University of Cologne / Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies

• Bruno de Paula Castanho Silva, University of Cologne