Gender Inequality in Deliberative Participation
Karpowitz, Mendelberg and Shaker ask whether women have equal voice and authority in deliberation, and whether adding women to a group closes the gap; their answer is that the group's gender composition and its decision rule interact. Between 2007 and 2009 they randomly assigned 470 people, in 94 five-person groups, to one of six gender compositions, from no women to five, and to decide by unanimous or majority rule. Each group discussed, then chose by secret ballot, the most just principle for redistributing income its members would earn in the experiment. Each member's speech was recorded on a separate audio track, and afterwards each privately named the most influential member.
In five of the eight mixed-gender conditions women spoke significantly less than men on one-tailed tests, and in most their participation was under 75 per cent of men's. Under majority rule the gap was large with one or two women and not significant with four, though, against their prediction, still present with three; under unanimous rule the pattern reversed, with no significant gap when women were one or two and a large one when they were three or four. They theorise that unanimity sets an expectation that each voice should be heard, protecting numerical minorities of either gender: minority women use it to reach equality, minority men to exceed it. Women talked more in all-female groups than in mixed groups where they were the majority. The gender gap in influence votes followed the same interaction, narrowing as women's numbers grew under majority rule and widening under unanimous rule. Members who held the floor for a greater share of the discussion were more likely to be named influential, and the speech gap mediated an estimated 59 per cent of the conditions' effect on the influence gap, an estimate they call partial because the mediation method they used did not yet extend to their interacted design, which also ruled out its sensitivity analysis.
Their guidelines follow: where women are outnumbered, use unanimous rule; where they are a large majority, use majority rule; avoid few women under majority rule. Their caveats include small groups, white non-Hispanic participants only, the untested effect of moderators, statistical power they call somewhat limited, and the chance that a more stereotypically feminine topic would shrink or reverse the gap. The design is one redistribution task at two US sites, with strangers and nonbinding decisions, which they argue shares important similarities with many citizen deliberative bodies. The study is of citizen deliberation and measures speech and perceived influence, not felt safety; the bridge to psychological safety is ours. We read it as suggesting that who speaks in a meeting, and who is then credited with influence, is shaped by who is in the room and how it decides, so silence can belong to the structure rather than the person, and a rule that helps one minority speak can lift another past equality.
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