Last week, those directed A during a hearing won. Marina, who was a councilwoman, state deputy, senator and is a federal deputy licensed to occupy, for the second time, the Ministry of Environment, – today one.
Only in 2021 was formally created the female bench in the Brazilian Senate. Only in April this year, the senators won the right to their own office. Plenary time is recognized by political scientists as a disputed and scarce resource, crucial in legislative dynamics.
Traditionally, the focus was on centralizing the agenda powers in the hands of party leaders. More recently, however, interest has grown on how gender factors shape access to this feature.
Two recent studies analyze precisely the patterns of discourse interruption in the plenary, comparing the experience of men and women. Sebastián Vallejo Vera and Analía Gómez Vidal (2022) studied more than 54,000 speeches in the Ecuadorian Congress between 1988 and 2018; Already Debora Thome and Mauricio Izumi (2025) analyzed almost 70,000 speeches given by Brazilian senators and senators between 1995 and 2018.
Both identify that.
In Ecuador, even though it is less interrupted than men, women suffer more from the effects of these interruptions: after being interrupted, they tend to speak for less time and take longer to return to the podium. It is a form of “strategic self -silence”, the result of the anticipation of the reputational costs of the interruptions – specially when.
In Brazil, the average of interruptions is not higher among women, but the scenario changes among those in leadership positions: leading senators are more interrupted than their fellow men – especially by men of the party itself.
Both studies show that women’s speeches are, on average, shorter than men’s, and that the standard of interruptions has asymmetrical effects. In the Ecuadorian case, women tend to voluntarily reduce speech time to avoid further confrontations. In the Brazilian case, women leaders, in the form of interruptions and questions that put their authority in check.
Didactically exemplifies the hostility faced by women in spaces of power. But more than an isolated case, both in the legislature and in other public and private leadership spaces.
This kind of symbolic violence usually goes unnoticed and rarely becomes headline. But it has concrete consequences: it affects the performance and permanence of women in politics. With Minister Marina Silva, what was seen was only the most public face of a silent and everyday standard.
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