1Differences between the language of men and women have been the focus of much research in sociolinguistics, stylistics, rhetoric, gender studies, media studies and discourse analysis (see Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 2013; Wodak, 2007). The results show that the differences are subtle but systematic (Newman et al., 2008). Despite this, political communication studies have traditionally been based on male politicians, and only recently have scholars begun to consider the discourse of female politicians (see Marshall, 2000).

2This is important because several authors (Antić Gaber and Ilonszki, 2003; Leijenaar, 1997; Wolbrecht, 2002) have demonstrated that female legislators differ from their male counterparts in the issues they address, the positions they take, and the approaches they use in law-making. In their analysis of the representation of women in the UK Parliament after 1945, Blaxill and Beelen (2016) showed a stronger emphasis on the topics related to women in speeches delivered by female MPs, who on average also contributed considerably more speeches about women in comparison to male MPs. In political science (see Osborn, 2012), topics related to women are considered those that are, on the one hand, traditionally believed to be in the domain of women (for example, education, healthcare, etc.), and on the other that concern women’s well-being directly (for example, childcare, domestic violence, equality, etc.). Similarly, Bäck et al. (2014), Hansen et al. (2018) and Mensah and Wood (2018) found in the corpora of parliamentary speeches from Sweden, Denmark and Ghana, respectively, that women more often spoke about soft policy areas in comparison to men who more often tackled hard policy areas. This terminology is adopted from political science (e.g., Wängnerud, 1996), where policy areas are divided into so-called hard (e.g., Macroeconomics, Energy, Transportation, Banking, Finance and Domestic Commerce, Space, Science and Technology, and Communications) and soft ones (e.g., Health, Labour, Employment and Immigration, Education, and Social Welfare).

3We should note, however, that various parameters (e.g., social class, context, age, hierarchy) have been shown to influence language use and that gender is only one of them (Coates, 1997; Litosseliti, 2006). Furthermore, as Bing and Bergvall (1998) point out, similarities in language use of different genders are often overlooked despite being more outstanding than the differences. Likewise, Blaxill and Beelen (2016) have shown a similar tendency in the context of parliamentary discourse research. Therefore, we always need to be careful not to jump to quick conclusions and over-interpret the results for the features we expect to see because we know the gender of the speaker (Goddard and Patterson, 2015).