The Effect of Gender on Interruptions at Congressional Hearings

Abstract

Women in Congress are highly effective legislators. Yet, if women are more likely than men to be interrupted during committee work, they may face a gender-related impediment. We examine speech patterns during more than 24,000 congressional committee hearings from 1994 to 2018 to determine whether women Members are more likely to be interrupted than men. We find that they are. This is especially true in Senate committees—where women are about 10% more likely to be interrupted. Furthermore, in hearings that discuss women’s issues, women are more than twice as likely to be interrupted than while discussing other issues. We see a similar pattern for rapid-fire “interruption clusters,” an aggressive form of interruption. We further consider a range of moderating factors, which yields little evidence that women change their communication strategy as they gain experience in Congress. We also find suggestive evidence that interruptions are driven by mixed-gender interactions.

"Let Me Just Interrupt You": Estimating Gender Effects in Supreme Court Oral Arguments

“…Our findings contribute to the burgeoning research on the inability of women to participate in legal, political, and social spaces (e.g., Miller and Sutherland 2022;Ban, Grimmer, Kaslovsky and West 2022) and does so at a more granular level for legal scholars, providing opportunities for future research to explore solutions. Our approach is generalizable and offers clear pathways for future research to extend the analysis into more recent terms and other decision-making contexts.…”

“…In the context of oral argument, the attorneys are generally understood to be, universally, operating at a deficit with respect to the justices. However, when female advocates before the Court are addressing a "women's issue", they are likely to be perceived as operating from a position of authority; that being the case, we might expect female advocates to be interrupted less frequently than male advocates when the issue of the case is a "women's issue", as has been found in other settings (Miller and Sutherland 2022;Patton and Smith 2017).…”

“…In committees, they are likely to be interrupted more often when they are speaking (Miller and Sutherland 2022). Should a woman instead choose to go into the legal profession, they likewise face significant hurdles to their participation.…”

“…The substantive issue of the case stands as an additional and potent confounder. Specifically, prior work has established that women are interrupted less frequently across settings when they are perceived to be speaking from a position of authority (e.g., Miller and Sutherland 2022). In the context of oral argument, the attorneys are generally understood to be, universally, operating at a deficit with respect to the justices.…”

Gender and the Dynamics of Economics Seminars

“…While there have been few studies on the occurrence of interruptions in conference settings, Miller and Sutherland's (2018) analysis of transcripts from Congressional hearings revealed that women were more likely to be interrupted than men were, and also that women were more likely than men to be interrupted by other women. Jacobi and Schweers (2017) reviewed Oral Arguments from the Supreme Court and found that women were interrupted more often than their male counterparts were, although seniority and political leaning also played a role.…”