Gender, Twitter and the Politics of Inclusion: Policy Differences in the Tweets of Women and Men Politicians during the 2015 British General Election

Twitter is increasingly promoted as an important tool in the politician’s communications repertoire. As a direct form of communication which avoids the filter of the journalist’s interpretive lens, tweets are regarded, at least by politicians themselves, as ways in which they can show who they really are. This study compared the tweets of the most frequent users of twitter amongst British MPs – 20 women and 20 men – in order to explore what, if any, gender-based differences were evident in the content of their tweets and the extent to which their messages enjoyed additional circulation and thus potential influence. We collected all the tweets from our 40 MPs during the five-week election campaign (approx. 40,000 tweets) and applied different filters to work with different parts of the sample, concentrating on the original (approx. 18,000) tweets rather than retweets. We found that both gender and party membership were important indicators of difference in terms of policy, levels of personalisation and leveraging influence. For example, women were more likely to tweet about the impact of particular policy measures on women and families, whilst men were more likely to tweet about other MPs or general party policy. Women were much more likely to thank people – their campaign team, members of the public, general supporters – than men and were much more likely to foster notions of the collective, than men. Men were slightly more likely to have their tweets favourite or re-tweeted, although there were considerable Party-based differences. I argue that the more general assumptions about women’s more collegial political style, consensus-seeking and desire to include different perspectives can be seen to be operating in their twitter behaviour as well, so that social media communication tools are merely the latest platform through which gendered forms of communication can be observed.