No Longer Conforming to Stereotypes? Gender, Political Style and Parliamentary Debate in the UK

Abstract

Research on political style suggests that where women make arguments that are more emotional, empathetic and positive, men use language that is more analytical, aggressive and complex. However, existing work does not consider how gendered patterns of style vary over time. Focusing on the UK, we argue that pressures for female politicians to conform to stereotypically ‘feminine’ styles have diminished in recent years. To test this argument, we describe novel quantitative text-analysis approaches for measuring a diverse set of styles at scale in political speech data. Analysing UK parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019, we show that the debating styles of female MPs have changed substantially over time, as women in Parliament have increasingly adopted stylistic traits that are typically associated with ‘masculine’ stereotypes of communication. Our findings imply that prominent gender-based stereotypes of politicians' behaviour are significantly worse descriptors of empirical reality now than they were in the past.

A Double Standard? Gender Bias in Voters' Perceptions of Political Arguments

“…Further, there is evidence that UK politicians have come to behave in a way that is less consistent with traditional gender stereotypes. Women politicians have decreasingly used 'communal' and increasingly used 'agentic' styles over time (Hargrave and Blumenau 2022). The pessimistic assumption is that this behaviour change might be met by backlash from voters.…”

“…If it is true that women happen to make greater use of communal styles – such as emotion or anecdotes – than men, then they may incur negative competence evaluations simply because of the styles they use. Evidence from a variety of contexts has shown that women politicians are more emotional (Dietrich, Hayes and O'Brien 2019) and draw more on anecdotes (Hargrave and Langengen 2021), though recent work has shown that women have made decreasing use of these styles over time in the UK (Hargrave and Blumenau 2022). In short, identifying the mechanism through which biases emerge in the judgement of politicians' behaviour is challenging, and I make an important contribution by shedding light on one crucial aspect of this complex process: whether voters' perceptions of and attitudes towards elite political communication are gendered.…”

Working Hard or Hardly Working? Gender and Voter Evaluations of Legislator Productivity

“…Previous UK experimental work has shown that constituency service is a commodity that is highly valued by voters (Campbell et al, 2019a(Campbell et al, , 2019b. Further, dealing with the concerns of the constituency may more closely relate to feminine stereotypes of women's supposed "communality" than our other attributes (Eagly & Karau, 2002;Hargrave & Blumenau, 2022). At least anecdotally too, women politicians are thought to engage in constituency activities to a greater extent than men (Childs, 2004).…”

Advocates of climate action? The age of members of parliament and their activity in legislative debates on climate change

“…For instance, MPs with a migrant background are more active in legislative debates if the topic of the debate focuses on issues related to the interests of migrants (Bäck and Debus 2020;Saalfeld and Bischof 2013). Likewise, female MPs give more speeches in policy domains that reflect stereotype women's interests (e.g., Bäck and Debus 2019;Blumenau 2021;Hargrave and Blumenau 2021), either because of the strategic interests of the respective MPs or because their party forces those MPs with a particular personal background to be more active in related policy areas for vote-seeking reasons.…”