The evidence supporting the idea that male and female legislators have different communication styles has mostly come from interviews with legislators rather than analysis of speeches given in parliament. Analysing speeches delivered in the UK House of Commons between 1997 and 2016, Lotte Hargrave and Tone Langengen found compelling evidence for differences: women are more likely to evidence arguments with personal experience, discuss policies in a more concrete way, and are less adversarial than men. They argue these findings have important implications for how political communication styles might improve public engagement with politicians, offer a different focus to the discussion, and improve democratic legitimacy.

As countries respond to COVID-19, media outlets have widely reported that female leaders seem to have a leadership style that is better suited to responding to the crisis than that of their male counterparts. In academic literature too, the claims that male and female legislators might have different approaches to ‘doing politics’ have long existed. A key dimension upon which men and women are said to differ is with respect to their communication styles. So far however, the evidence base supporting this idea of gender differences in styles is mainly rooted in the testimonies of politicians themselves. In these interviews, women are said to evidence their arguments differently, have more concrete orientations when discussing policies and politics, and to be less adversarial or aggressive. 

In our newly published paper in the journal Politics & Gender, The Gendered Debate: Do Men and Women Communicate Differently in the House of Commons?, we build upon these insights. Specifically, we set about measuring whether there are differences in the communication styles of male and female legislators in the UK House of Commons through analysis of almost 200 parliamentary speeches delivered between 1997 and 2016 on three policy areas: education, immigration, and welfare. 

Speechmaking is an important setting for analysis, as it is one of the most visible elements of a politician’s job, and receives significant media coverage. Speeches therefore have important implications for how policies are discussed and informed, how the public engages with political elites, and how legislators represent their constituents.

In our paper, we measure three distinct indicators of style. First, argumentation captures the strategies men and women use to evidence their arguments. We test the argument that women tend to make greater use of personal and anecdotal experience, whereas men focus more on facts and numbers. Second, orientation captures how men and women focus their discussion of issues and policies. Women are said to be more likely to orient their discussions to concrete and specific groups and people (such as single mothers, low income families or students), whereas men are said to orient their discussion of policies and politics in terms of abstract issues (such as the economy, the system, or the state). Third, adversarial language captures behaviour such as insulting others or engaging in political point-scoring, which men are thought to use more often.  Continue reading →