Female Politicians’ Gendered Communicative Structures; A Multimodal Combination of Masculine Verbal and Feminine Nonverbal Patterns

Abstract

Recently there has been growing number of women running for national political positions. This study presents multimodal gender communicative-structures of female politicians. We analyzed 80 political interviews by all female politicians who ran for the 20th Knesset in Israel (n=40). The findings revealed novel integrated structures that combine masculine-verbal and feminine-nonverbal communicative-patterns. Unexpectedly, the adaptation of the mixed multimodal communicative-structure was strongly correlated with power, particularly in terms of seniority. In contemporary political communication, the inclusion of feminine-nonverbal communicative-patterns is a manifestation of political strength rather than of weakness. However, female politicians from cultural minorities express masculine-verbal and nonverbal communication-patterns, constituting the traditional communication-pattern of female politicians, which assumes that the key to female politicians’ success is adopting masculine communicative-structure.