Study Shows Women Get Fewer Words In On Cable News
Ashique KhudaBukhsh, Rochester Institute of Technology
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The big idea
My colleagues and I used artificial intelligence to analyze hundreds of thousands of dialogues on cable news programs in order to better understand the nature of interruptions in political discussions. We found that women get substantially fewer opportunities to speak in those settings than men, and perhaps as a result they tend to interrupt more often than men.
Analyzing interruptions at this scale provides meaningful insights into subtle conversational dynamics and how they vary across race, gender, occupation and political orientation. In addition to gender differences, we found that across CNN, Fox News and MSNBC, conversations between people who hold opposite political beliefs are riddled with far more intrusive and unfriendly interruptions than those between people who share a political affiliation.