{"id":244,"date":"2014-08-19T15:37:35","date_gmt":"2014-08-19T19:37:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/haystaqdna.com\/?p=244"},"modified":"2014-08-19T15:46:48","modified_gmt":"2014-08-19T19:46:48","slug":"women-in-the-house","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/haystaqdna.com\/staging\/8843\/women-in-the-house\/","title":{"rendered":"Women in the House"},"content":{"rendered":"

Most of the research on women\u2019s representation looks at the types of policies Congress passes, and whether women vote for more \u201cpro-women\u201d policies than their male counterparts. Academic research on this topic is mixed, with some scholars finding overall differences between women and men in Congress, others finding differences on specific issues, and others finding no difference at all between the two groups. While this has been a hot topic in political science for several decades, we still don\u2019t have a definitive answer for whether men and women represent their constituents differently.<\/p>

This research typically relies on roll call votes \u2013 that is to say whether women are more likely to vote \u201cyes\u201d on legislation that men vote \u201cno\u201d on. Roll call data have a number of limitations, <\/a>and just because they are the easiest data to access doesn\u2019t mean they are the right data. To answer this unresolved question, we looked in a different place: speeches.<\/p>

Speeches, specifically Senate floor speeches, give us better leverage on the question for\u00a0 three reasons.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. They can be on any topic the Senator chooses<\/li>\n
  2. They can be measured on virtually infinite dimensions rather than a forced \u201cyes\/no\u201d dichotomy<\/li>\n
  3. Politicians speak far more than they vote, giving us bigger data<\/li>\n<\/ol>

    By looking at all Senate floor speeches in the 112th<\/sup> Congress (2011-2012), and comparing men and women in a high-dimensional model of word co-occurrence called HiDEx, <\/a>we were able to compute a \u201csemantic differential\u201d<\/a> score for a number of different words representing women\u2019s issues. We found a few significant differences between men and women.<\/p>\n

    \"chart1\"<\/a><\/p>

    We present our findings in the figure, and the full working paper is available on Academia.edu<\/a>. We show that women were more likely to describe other women and healthcare positively than men were, while they were more likely to describe guns negatively. They were also more likely to describe abortion as being about \u201cchoice\u201d than \u201clife.\u201d But most strikingly, women linked other more closely to \u201cwork\u201d rather than \u201chome.\u201d This shows a fundamental difference in worldviews between men and women, and a fundamental difference in how the different genders view the role of women in the modern world. These findings hold even when controlling for partisanship.<\/p>

    By applying a novel analysis to an old question we were not only able to help bring new evidence to a debate in the academic literature, but we were able to learn more about the differences between men and women than we would have if we only looked where everyone else was looking. Finding a new dataset and applying a more sophisticated, high-dimensional analysis gives us the advantage and shows differences that weren\u2019t otherwise apparent.<\/p>

     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Most of the research on women\u2019s representation looks at the types of policies Congress passes, and whether women vote for more \u201cpro-women\u201d policies than their male counterparts. Academic research on this topic is mixed, with some scholars finding overall differences between women and men in Congress, others finding differences on specific issues, and others finding […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nWomen in the House - Haystaq<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/haystaqdna.com\/women-in-the-house\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Women in the House - Haystaq\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Most of the research on women\u2019s representation looks at the types of policies Congress passes, and whether women vote for more \u201cpro-women\u201d policies than their male counterparts. 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