Dr Sylvia Shaw will give a plenary talk, ‘Calm down Dear!’ Women’s linguistic participation in UK Political Institutions, at the ICAME conference taking place 27–30 July 2022.
The 43rd Annual Conference of the International Computer Archive for Modern and Medieval English will be hosted by Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK.
The theme of ICAME 43 is ‘Corpus Linguistics: a new normal?’: As we move into the third decade of the 21st century, what has changed, what has stayed the same, and is there a ‘new normal’ in corpus linguistics?
Dr Sylvia Shaw will give a plenary talk, ‘Calm down Dear!’ Women’s linguistic participation in UK Political Institutions.
The underrepresentation of women in politics is a persistent and seemingly intractable problem for British politics. In this paper I discuss some of the findings from my 2020 book, Women, Language and Politics in which I attempt to use theoretical and methodological sociolinguistic approaches to discover some of the obstacles and barriers that women in politics face.
Researchers of political institutions are greatly helped by the wealth of data available to them in the analysis of political discourse from video recordings and written records to in-situ observation and large searchable datasets.
Here I discuss some of the advantages of combining approaches to identify patterns of participation across different institutions. In doing so, I discuss analyses of parliamentary data from The Scottish Parliament; the Northern Ireland Assembly; the Welsh Assembly and the House of Commons.
I also consider some of the pitfalls with conducting gender and language research, including oversimplifying the notion of a ‘women’s’ or ‘men’s style of speech, and failing to recognise the ideological underpinnings of beliefs about gendered behaviour.
