Making a difference? Gender Stereotypes in Members of Parliament Twitter self-presentation
PS10-2
Presented by: javier lorenzo, Amuitz Garmendia Madariaga
Literature has struggled to show how the substantive representation of women occurs in different political areas. While, in the last decade, scholarly attention has been relevantly redirected to gender differences in locus of power, analyses of women performance on social media are rather scarce. This lack of research is especially flagrant if considering that social media are increasingly the central stage in the development of political action. We here seek to fill this gap by exploring if female politicians behave differently from male ones on Twitter, if there exist any variation among the former group, and moreover, if this behaviour is anyhow connected to their offline roles and activity. Particularly, by focusing on Spain’s current legislature term, in this paper we aim to examine to what extent female and male MPs differ regarding their self-presentation strategies. Accordingly, we focus on Twitter bios as a novel source of information about users' interests and identities. Our results suggest that female MPs' bios are significantly different from male ones. In fact, we demonstrate that the similarity in the bio content can be used to predict the gender of the MP.