Do Women Deliberate with a Distinctive Voice? How Decision Rules and Group Gender Composition Affect the Content of Deliberation.

In this paper, we use an experimental approach to examine how the content of group discussion about income redistribution changes as other group-level features, including the group's decision rule and gender composition, change. In previous studies, we reported that these group-level features affect the level of participation by men and women. In this paper we further report that in the same conditions where women speak more, women are also more likely to speak a distinctive language. Not only do they speak less when they are minorities under majority rule; they speak less to the concerns women tend to raise in one-on-one interviews for national surveys, such as children, the family, and the poor. Unanimous rule dampens this effect of minority status for women. Relative to majority rule, under unanimous rule, numerical minority women are more likely to articulate women's distinctive topics. Unanimous rule in addition generally produces linguistic forms that tend to characterize women's distinctive speech patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]