In the Room Where it Happens: Positional Power and Gendered Institutional Discourse

Abstract How do individual-level characteristics shape discourse within political institutions? As communicative arenas, international organizations enact authority through speech, making discourse a key site for examining representation. In this paper, we consider how gendered characteristics impact speech within a specific international financial institution organ, the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF’s) Executive Board (EB), whose deliberations are consequential for global distributional governance, structured by hierarchical, expert-driven institutional norms. Building on existing IMF EB comment data, we evaluate a “Fundspeak”-gendered neoliberalism Latent Semantic Scaling of 90,072 EB meeting comments from 1995 to 2015. While we find that women speakers are more likely than men to use gendered neoliberal speech, taking advantage of plausibly exogenous change in EB composition, we also find that when powerful EB positions are held by women, the gendered speech of both women and men increases, suggesting that such prominence can shift organizational tone and focus. To account for this change, we theorize a mechanism of activated representation and argue that changes in meeting’s gendered composition can cause passive representation to become active when an individual’s representation thresholds are crossed.