Replication Data for: Earning Their Stripes? How Political Experience Shapes Gendered Policy Prioritisation

How does political experience affect the issues that men and women politicians prioritise? Gender stereotypical expectations dictate that women focus more on traditionally 'feminine' policy areas. While past findings broadly support this, they do not examine how policy priorities shift with increased experience. Focusing on the UK, I argue that gender differences in the extent to which politicians raise issues traditionally associated with women will be most pronounced among junior politicians who lack experience in the eyes of the public and their colleagues, but will decline with increased political experience. To test this, I study parliamentary debates between 1997 and 2019 and leverage novel quantitative text approaches to measure politicians’ issue priorities. I find that, among junior politicians, women talk significantly more about 'feminine' issues, however this gap decreases markedly with increased seniority. These findings have important implications for the representation of women's voices and perspectives within the policy-making process.