Women’s Structural Marginalization in Gendered Interactions in Parliament

Men and women speak differently in parliaments. Scholars have studied the volume, content and style of legislators’ speeches but neglected the interactive nature of language. Focusing on executive oversight, we argue that speaking behaviour depends on whether legislators interact with male or female members of the executive. The analysis of parliamentary question-and-answer sequences in the Croatian parliament shows that women address more questions to female members of the executive than to their male counterparts; their questions are shorter than men’s, although women give longer answers both to men’s and women’s questions. We also find that male MPs have shorter interactions with female ministers than male ministers. Men’s domination in parliaments is realized through micro-level interactions with women, although women also tend to fall into men’s pattern of marginalizing the standing of women ministers.