Two Centuries of Sexism in British Parliament: A Computational Analysis of Women's Representation in the Hansard Corpus
The language a legislature uses to debate women's rights, even in favour of them, encodes systematic patterns of sexism that persist across two centuries. In this work, we analyse 6,531 speeches over 200 years of UK parliamentary debate (Hansard, 1803-2005) by using large language models to classify a speaker's perspective towards women's suffrage and political representation, as well as analyse sexist speech in parliament from the lens of the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory. We also release this parliamentary dataset, an organized and metadata-enriched version of the publicly available Hansard Corpus optimized for computational social science research, with 6.7 million speeches across 1.2 million debates, with 89% gender-matching for speeches by MPs from the House of Commons. We find that 54% of speeches opposing women's representation contain sexist content, compared to 21% of speeches that are for the cause, and that the two sides use fundamentally different types of sexism: anti-suffrage rhetoric combines hostile and benevolent framing, while pro-suffrage sexism is overwhelmingly benevolent. Female MPs support women's political rights at 93% compared to 70% for male MPs, a gap that closes only after enfranchisement. Our findings are evidence that benevolent and hostile sexism are used in different rhetorical contexts in a manner consistent with the theory of Ambivalent Sexism.
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