Evolution of Women’s Descriptive and Substantive Representation: Evidence from 70 years of parliamentary debates

Jeremias Nieminen, Salla Simola and Janne Tukiainen
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Salla Simola: Wolt

No 161, Discussion Papers from Aboa Centre for Economics

Abstract: While differences between how men and women speak in parliament are well established, we still lack a study encompassing a longer time span. Finland was the first country in the world to allow women to run for office, facilitating studying the determinants of gender-based dif- ferences in parliamentary speech from an earlier period than in other countries. Using Finnish parliamentary speech data from 1948 to 2018 – a period spanning an era of token female presence to near-parity – we find that while women have always spoken differently from men, the differences get larger as 10-20 % of seats is surpassed in the 1960’s. At this point also women who already served in the parliament switch to topics more closely aligned with "women’s issues". Moreover, tenure length is not correlated with how women speak, suggesting that changes in women’s behavior may relate more to contextual factors

Keywords: critical mass; parliamentary speech; text analysis; women’s representation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 J16 N44 P00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 97
Date: 2026-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-gen, nep-his and nep-lab
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