'I am not an Honourable Lady': gender and language in the National Assembly for Wales

Women have been historically underrepresented in political institutions and it has been claimed that it is difficult for women to succeed in the masculinist cultures that exist in political contexts. The ‘new’ devolved institutions of the UK offer opportunities to investigate gender inequality in political contexts which have a greater proportion of women members; that have included women from their inception; and that have been designed with egalitarian issues to the fore. Here, ethnographic and discourse analytic data is used to assess a senior woman’s performance in the National Assembly for Wales; to explore politicians’ appraisal of this performance; and to analyse the breakdown of the debate floor in terms of ‘rule-breaking’ activities such as barracking. In this Community of Practice the individual’s performance draws upon communicative styles that are both stereotypically masculine (adversarial) and feminine (consensual), which can be viewed as an indication of the speaker’s competence. However, this is undermined by the speaker’s failure to adopt the correct linguistic practices for this CoP which leads to the breakdown of the formal debate discourse. Assembly Members appraise this failure negatively while also drawing upon stereotypical notions of gendered communicative norms and wider discourses of gender differentiation.

An ethnographic investigation into gender and language in the Northern Ireland Assembly

This paper investigates the extent to which the negative evaluation of one of the women Ministers in the Northern Ireland Assembly can be attributed to gender. Interviews with politicians as well as the Minister herself illuminate this discussion by identifying the ‘gendered discourses’ that are drawn upon when describing the Minister’s communicative style in debates. Close analyses of transcripts of debates offer a description of some elements of this style, and find that while the Minister is confrontational in debates and ‘stands her ground’, she does not take part in illegal interventions that disrupt the debate floor and are characteristic of the Assembly as a whole. Although the construction of the Minister’s unpopularity can be attributed to a complex interplay of factors, it can be concluded that it is partly the way she draws on gendered linguistic resources that leads her to be negatively judged by her peers.

Gender, Power and Political Speech: Women and Language in the 2015 UK General Election

Gender, Power and Political Speech explores the influence of gender on political speech by analyzing the performances of three female party leaders who took part in televised debates during the 2015 UK General Election campaign. The analysis considers similarities and differences between the women and their male colleagues, as well as between the women themselves; it also discusses the way gender - and its relationship to language - was taken up as an issue in media coverage of the campaign.

Competition for Cooperation: variability, benefits and heritability of relational wealth in hunter-gatherers

Many defining human characteristics including theory of mind, culture and language relate to our sociality, and facilitate the formation and maintenance of cooperative relationships. Therefore, deciphering the context in which our sociality evolved is invaluable in understanding what makes us unique as a species. Much work has emphasised group-level competition, such as warfare, in moulding human cooperation and sociality. However, competition and cooperation also occur within groups; and inter-individual differences in sociality have reported fitness implications in numerous non-human taxa. Here we investigate whether differential access to cooperation (relational wealth) is likely to lead to variation in fitness at the individual level among BaYaka hunter-gatherers. Using economic gift games we find that relational wealth: a) displays individual-level variation; b) provides advantages in buffering food risk, and is positively associated with body mass index (BMI) and female fertility; c) is partially heritable. These results highlight that individual-level processes may have been fundamental in the extension of human cooperation beyond small units of related individuals, and in shaping our sociality. Additionally, the findings offer insight in to trends related to human sociality found from research in other fields such as psychology and epidemiology.