An agnostic approach to gender patterns in parliamentary speech: a question of representation by topic and style

By examining all speech in the 18th legislative period (2013–17) of German Bundestag, including 6,598,831 words 51,337 text segments, we compare women’s and men’s parliamentary speech. Our approach builds on agnostic view representation follows a bottom-up approach, which avoids pre-set definitions what is or language use. analysing frequencies most used keywords from semantic networks, find four notable descriptive patterns. First, female members parliament tended to talk more about stereotypical ‘feminine’ policy issues like, for instance, contraception. Second, put people central their language, while male focused Germany as country. Third, women procedures than men. Lastly, politer style, by thanking others, parliament.