Gender Differences in Justice Claims during Parliamentary Speeches on Sustainable Transformation: Speaking About Justice or Just Speaking?

To what extent does MPs’ gender shape how they frame sustainable transformation as a question of justice? Designing policies for sustainable transformation raises distinctive challenges of equity and fairness. Mitigating and adapting to climate change entails costs that often burden vulnerable groups such as the poor or the less educated, while inaction imposes costs on future generations. Political discourse on climate change is thus inherently tied to questions of justice. Previous research shows that men and women MPs differ in their parliamentary communication styles: women tend to employ more human-centered narratives and emotional appeals, whereas men rely more on fact-based and complex reasoning. Building on these observations, we examine how gendered communication styles influence MPs’ use of justice claims in debates about sustainable transformation. We answer three questions: (1) Are women MPs more likely than men to make justice-related claims in this context? (2) To what extent is this pattern specific to sustainable transformation as an inherently justice-related policy area, or in how far does it extend to other areas of policymaking? (3) How do parties’ levels of support for far-reaching transformation policies affect gendered patterns of justice discourse? Using quantitative text analysis of speeches from 29 parliaments contained in the ParlaMint II corpus (Erjavec et al. 2025), we provide cross-national evidence on gendered framing of justice in sustainability debates. Our findings advance understanding of women’s role as political actors in shaping narratives of sustainable transformation.