Women have a distinctive voice in parliaments. Analysis of female legislators’ speaking behavior, including floor apportionment and policy issues they address, informs inferences about their effectiveness. In this vein, less adversarial tenor of female MPs’ speeches has been taken as an indicator of their less robust questioning of the members of the executive. To advance our understanding of the gendered patterns of legislative behaviour and their implications, we draw on the scholarship on gender and language in the field of social psychology and scrutinize the legislators’ speaking style. We analyze the text corpus comprised of parliamentary questions and answer sequences in the Croatian parliament from 2004 and 2020, and conduct quantitative content analysis that combines computer-assisted techniques and human coding of the discourse. A novel assessment of how female legislators’ interrogate ministers, rooted in Conversation Analysis―an approach to the study of interactive features of talk―systematically captures linguistic, deliberative and semantic features of discourse. The results show that female parliamentarians are no less robust questioners than their male counterparts. They put pressure on the answerer to account for government policy using different linguistic forms, rather than open aggression evident in semantic features of a speaker’s language. This research furthers the study of gender and politics by demonstrating that the masculine discourse in parliaments is used not only to ensure male dominance in parliaments, as scholars of feminist institutionalism have argued, but also to obscure the agency of female MPs and their effective oversight of the executive.