Gendered speaking-time in the Danish parliament

As we described in our last blogpost, we recently started playing around with some data from the discussions in the Danish parliament. We are super excited to present you with our first findings.

We have looked at the total amount of words (stop-words, like ‘and’, ‘to’ etc. have been removed) spoken in parliament and split it up according to gender (by binary, due to data). In short, we find that women consistently speak less than men, even after we correct for the relatively lower number of women in parliament.

Below figure shows our main finding, that women, consistently, across seven years (independent from which party is in power), speak less than would be expected based on their percentage of seats in parliament. In general, over the past 7 years, they have spoken 525.000 words fewer than would be expected, which corresponds to roughly 73 hours of speaking time (assuming average speaking-speed).

How did we estimate this?

Starting from raw speech-data we take the name of each individual and split the data according to Danish gender-registries for names (in Denmark, all names are registered by gender that they are approved for). Some names were missing, and were added manually based on the persons self-identified gender. No entries self-identified outside of the gender-binary according to the data.

We cleaned the data by removing stop-words, numbers, dates and the names of politicians. From here it was pretty simple to separate the spoken words by gender and get an overview of the divide.

The below two figures illustrate the number of words spoken, divided by gender, and summed up for each month and each parliamentary year. As you can see on the top figure, the number of words spoken varies over time, due to election-years, current political and societal events and more. To get a more general overview, we have therefore chosen to emphasize the data-gap on a year-by-year basis in the second figure.

We tallied up the numbers for women and men to get an idea of how much women speak proportionally to men. For instance, our numbers show that, in the last year (2019-20), women account for 34% of all spoken words in the Danish parliament. Because there are more men in parliament we compare the number to how much we can expect women to speak given their representation in the parliament. In 2019-20 women held 39% (70 out of 179) seats in parliament.

We estimate the gender gap by comparing the difference between how much women speak, to how large a proportion of parliament they make up. This comparison is not perfect. For instance, it can be expected that leaders of political parties and people who hold prominent positions in parliament, like ministers, would clock more speaking time than the average member. An interesting next step could be to look closer at how these factors impact speaking time. Our code will be available on github once we finish this series of blogposts (link to follow soon). In the meantime, please reach out to us with any questions, queries, or for collaborations.