Governed by the Rules?: The Female Voice in Parliamentary Debates

New perspectives on language and gender: Linguistic prescription and compliance in call centres

“…While greater female rule compliance has been shown to happen in maledominated workplaces, such as the British House of Commons (Shaw 2006), this study shows that it happens also in female-dominated workplaces, and perhaps particularly in highly-regimented workplaces such as call centres.…”

“…While rule compliance is valued and rewarded in schools, by the time young women enter the professional arena it may start to work against them, keeping them at bay in highly regimented jobs with low prestige and little influence. Shaw's (2006) study suggests that rule compliance may work against women even in powerful professions. By deliberately not breaking the turn-taking rules as much as their male counterparts, female politicians in the British parliament get less talk time and, hence, potentially, less influence (Shaw 2006).…”

“…Shaw's (2006) study suggests that rule compliance may work against women even in powerful professions. By deliberately not breaking the turn-taking rules as much as their male counterparts, female politicians in the British parliament get less talk time and, hence, potentially, less influence (Shaw 2006).…”

Tracing Gender Differences in Parliamentary Debates: A Growth Curve Analysis of Ugandan Mps’ Activity Levels in Plenary Sessions, 1998–2008

“…Regardless of power differences, women tend to engage less in verbal aggressiveness or dominant behaviour. Studies of language, gender and political debates show that women do not break debate rules to gain advantage as much as their male counterparts (Christie 2003;Edelsky and Adams 1990;Shaw 2000Shaw , 2006. Scholars point to cultural stereotypes about gender and expectations related to social roles as a reason that men and women behave differently.…”

An Ethnographic Investigation into Gender and Language in the Northern Ireland Assembly

“…It has been claimed that the devolved parliaments of the UK offer women greater opportunities to participate than older, traditional parliaments because they have included women from the beginning and because they are constructed with egalitarian and inclusive aims. Previous sociolinguistic research on House of Commons debates has found that although women participate equally with men in terms of the formal or 'legal' debate rules, they do not participate equally in terms of illegal debate discourse (by contributing 'out of turn', for example) [1][2]. The reasons for this are likely to be complex, and related in part to the 'visibility' of women in a traditionally male-dominated forum [3] and the nature of traditional parliaments as a 'linguistic habitus' [4] in which 'silence or hypercontrolled language' is imposed on some people, while others are allowed the 'liberties of a language that is securely established' [5].…”