Australian Hansard, 1998-2025
A data story on how parliamentary interjections differ by speaker gender, party, and speech style.
Scroll (or tap chapters) to switch between yearly, gap, party, chair-gender, and longer-speech views.
This graph tracks the share of speeches receiving any interjection for male and female speakers over time, with election years and government turnover annotated. Men are heckled more than women in most years, with notable compression and occasional reversals around the Gillard period.
Positive values indicate years where male speakers had a higher probability of receiving interjections.
Some show near parity (ALP/Greens); others show much wider (Independents) separation.
This comparison splits speaker-level interruption rates by whether the presiding officer is a woman or a man. In the current data, interjections are slightly lower when women chair, and the male-female interruption gap is narrower under female chairs (about 6.2 pp) than under male chairs (about 8.3 pp).
Interjection risk rises with speech length for both genders, but not equally. At short speech lengths, men and women are near parity; as speeches lengthen, interruption risk rises faster for men, and the gender gap widens.
This interactive view shows model-estimated effect sizes with 95% confidence intervals.
Femininity score Text-based measure of speech style: higher values indicate language patterns that are more feminine-coded in the model's training data. is included as a predictor in the model.
How to read this graph: points to the right of zero are associated with more interjections, points to the left with fewer. Longer horizontal bars indicate more statistical uncertainty; if a bar crosses zero, the direction of the effect is less certain.
I use a transparent policy-topic dictionary (security/defense, health, economy, foreign policy, education, climate/environment) and test whether interruption exposure differs by speaker gender within each topic and over time.
Cross-Sectional Pattern
Economy shows the largest male-minus-female interruption gap, while education and health are closer to parity.
Dynamic Pattern
This view tracks yearly male-minus-female interruption gaps by policy topic to identify widening, narrowing, and reversal dynamics.
Method note Each speech is assigned to one policy topic using a transparent keyword dictionary; the chart tracks the yearly male-minus-female interruption-rate gap (in percentage points) within each topic.
This section shows who heckles most over time by party, and lets readers look up any MP in the corpus by name or unique ID.
Party coding uses AustralianPoliticians as the base crosswalk and a uniqueID-year patch from observed Hansard party labels through 2025.
Party Dynamics
Rates are calculated as interjecting turns per 100 speaking turns within each party and year.
Interpretation: a higher line means members of that party interjected more often during their speaking turns in that year.
Reader Tool
Search by surname, full name, or unique ID. Rankings below are shown among MPs with at least 200 speaking turns.
Use the toggle to switch between MPs who interject most (hecklers) and MPs who are interrupted most (heckled MPs).
Showing MPs who interject most often.
| Rank | MP | Party | Years active |
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