“I would like your excellency, please, that your excellency or you would not interrupt me because it is a line of reasoning…”, said the then senator (-MS), in 2021.
Now Minister of Planning, Tebet was leader of the women’s bench when she was in the spotlight during the commission that investigated the government’s role in the pandemic.
In the speech reproduced above, she was addressing the witness of the day, the former Minister of Health, so that she could complete the speech. In the same session, Tebet had his speech interrupted at least 11 times by the men in the room.
The constant interruption of Tebet is not an isolated case, shows a study published last month in the magazine dados, from UERJ (State University of Rio de Janeiro). The research analyzed speeches in the Senate between 1995 and 2018 and concluded that they are interrupted more than men with the same positions.
Data from almost 70 thousand speeches analyzed by researchers Débora Thomé, from Fundação Getulio Vargas, and Mauricio Izumi, from the Federal University of Espírito Santo, show that women who accumulate symbolic power, such as the position of party leader or bench, have 12. 5% more chance of interruption than men in the same position.
“We had the hypothesis that women would always be interrupted more”, explains Thomé. This was not confirmed, and men without a leadership position are 7.5% more likely to suffer a failure.
“But, when the raisin has some symbolic power, it becomes more interrupted to the point of often not being able to complete the reasoning”, says the researcher.
And why does this matter? “Parliament is the place for speech, for expressing your ideas. If a woman is unable to do this, she is not occupying that position satisfactorily”, he states.
In the case of elected women, who are still a minority in Congress, internal power relations define how much of an agenda and effective political power senators and deputies are able to exercise.
Therefore, it is not enough to be elected. “We wanted to look at this to see how effective female representation in politics is, because if we can’t increase the power of the women within, it’s difficult to move forward”, says Thomé.
The interruption of a woman by a man who doesn’t let her complete her reasoning even has a specific name in English, which has become popular in feminist circles in recent years: gerarrupting (a combination of “man”, man, and “interrupting”, meaning interruption ).
The practice is not exclusive to the Senate. The influencer (), during his campaign for Mayor of São Paulo, sometimes interrupted the only woman among the best-placed candidates, ().
In the research on female senators, one thing stands out: female leaders are more likely to be interrupted by senators from their own party. Data shows that women are 28.5% more likely to be cut off while speaking by a supporter than a man in a similar position.
For Thomé, internal disputes for power in parties and a greater perception of the lack of legitimacy of female leadership drive these interruptions. “It’s surprising, but a relative surprise if we stop to think that they are all competing for internal space within the subtitles”, he says.
The analyzed interruptions occur in . In one of the examples in the study, the then senator (PP-RS) was speaking in 2017 when she was interrupted by (PP-RO), who started talking about an amendment that he himself had presented to the project she was addressing.
Years earlier, in 2000, the then PT senator (AL) began a speech speaking 230 words. The then senator (-SP) asked to interrupt her and gave a speech of 518 words — more than double the original speech.
Furthermore, women are 11.4% more likely to be questioned by their peers than male leaders, a figure read in the study as a greater chance of having their credibility called into question.
For researchers, the work demonstrates that gender barriers do not cease to exist once a woman goes through the first challenge, that of being elected. “We need to be concerned about how much these women are exercising effective power within Parliament”, concludes Thomé.
