Unravelling gender biases in public service delivery: The role of gender in frontline communication

It is well established that women are treated differently than men when accessing public services, leading to biased administrative outcomes. We lack however empirical insights on the underlying micro-mechanisms causing discriminatory public service patterns at the macro-level. This paper seeks to contribute towards closing this gap by investigating gender biases in the language used by street-level bureaucrats when talking to citizens. Recent research indicates that the communication between citizens and frontline bureaucrats has a direct impact on administrative outcomes as well as citizen perceptions. Meanwhile, the field of sociolinguistics provides ample empirical evidence on gender-differences in communication. So far, we know however virtually nothing about the linkage between frontline communication and gender-specific discrimination. To provide a first empirical test of this relationship we draw on an original data set that comprises 132 recorded dialogs between street-level bureaucrats and their clients and a survey among the employees, using natural language pro-cessing and survey methods for the analysis. We hypothesize that bureaucrats’ and clients’ gender as well as gender matching affects frontline communication. Moreover, we assume that gender matches lower differences in the language use between bureaucrats and clients. The paper makes an important contribution to the recent literature on administrative communication, bureaucratic encounters and inequality in public service delivery by initially exploring the role of spoken administrative language in gender biases.