Blair's babes and Cameron's chaps

When Tony Blair took office in 1997, around a quarter of the MPs elected for the Labour Party were women. Since the House of Commons had up until that point been viewed as an enclave of male privilege, this influx of women was expected to change the dynamics of the institution. Would the women change the tone of debate? Would the bear pit of privately educated middle-aged white males yelling at each other be altered, calmed down and turned into a collaborative and cooperative place for civilised and rational discussion? After all, women cooperate and men compete, don't they?

Well, not really. As one of our speakers at the conference, Sylvia Shaw, discovered, the common stereotypes of female conversational didn't really mean a lot when it came to parliament. As reported in The Guardian in 2007, what Shaw discovered was that "In proportion to their numbers, women spoke as often as men and challenged other speakers to "give way" as readily as men. In short, they were (as MPs at Westminster have to be) assertive in competing for opportunities to speak". So, in other words, the women MPs adjusted to the competitive norms of parliament, rather than changing it. But there were differences and ones that link back to previous research into gender and conversation.

Dr. Sylvia Shaw

Shaw discovered that women tended not to break the rules as much as the men. "In five debates analysed closely by Shaw, men made almost 10 times as many illegal interventions as women. If these were counted alongside legal turns, women's overall contribution shrank to two-thirds of the men's total...This, Shaw suggested, put women at a disadvantage, because taking turns illegally is a powerful strategy...Women MPs, by not interrupting, are denying themselves both visibility and influence".

In her talk at the 2013 emagazine English Language conference, Women and Men at the Top, Sylvia Shaw will be looking at some of the wider issues around how gender and interaction has been studied over the decades and then look at some of the most recent work she has been doing in the devolved parliaments of the UK, taking the research she did in the House of Commons to the new parliaments and assemblies of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

As we should be aware from work we do on Language and Gender at AS and A2, things are never as simple as just saying "women do x and men do y", or even that Men are from Mars and Women from Venus, and Shaw's talk is bound to open our eyes to some of the subtleties and nuances of how we talk to each other and how our elected representatives use language to debate and govern.