Do women politicians face more interruptions? An analysis of interjections in the Australian parliamentary debates (1998-2025)

Interruptions are a routine component of parliamentary debate, but also reveal underlying power dynamics and behavioural norms within political institutions. Using digitised Australian Hansard transcripts from 1998 to 2025, we examine interruptions in the House of Representatives debates, focusing on how gender and political party affect being interrupted. We analyze 535,961 statements, including 95,522 interruptions, from 391 unique speakers across 1651 sitting days in nine parliaments. Results from our negative binomial regression model suggest that women MPs may be less likely to be interrupted than men MPs, and that overall interruptions decreased as the number of women MPs increased. MPs from the Liberal Party of Australia, the Nationals, and the Australian Greens may be less likely to be interrupted than the Australian Labor Party. These findings provide evidence that institutional norms can shape representation and that quantitative analysis of parliamentary speech can reveal gendered patterns of discursive inequality.