Gender Differences in Political Discourse

Public speakers have always had a sense of
authority and power upon them, and this area was male
area for a long time. Together with different social
changes such as Women’s Movement, women became
more emancipated, participating in public sphere to a
larger extent influencing thus the area of political
discourse too.
Key question is whether gender and supposed gender
characteristics and differences connected to interaction
styles and public speaking affect creation of political
discourse and differences in its structure between male
and female politicians or they are not an important
factor for political discourse. In other words, does
gender affect a person’s political subjectivity?
The thesis is that gender specific differences in language
use and use of syntactic, semantic, pragmatic structures,
lexical style and rhetorical strategies create differences
in political discourse between male and female
politicians. Can these differences help the hegemonic
construction of female identity in political discourse?
The aim of the paper is to analyze language differences
in connection with supposed gender characteristics and
place them into context of political discourse.