Last night, as the Senate debated the nomination of Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to be the next Attorney General, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) began reading from a letter Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s widow, wrote in 1986 to oppose Sessions’s nomination to be a federal judge. The letter said he “used the power of his office as United States Attorney to intimidate and chill the free exercise of the ballot by citizens.”
Both Warren and Scott King were abruptly silenced when Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) used an arcane Senate rule to shut Warren down. The rule says senators can’t impugn each other on the Senate floor. Warren was then told by the chair, Sen. Steve Daines (R-MT), to take a seat.
“She was warned. She was given an explanation,” McConnell said afterward. “Nevertheless, she persisted.”
The move, which was then backed up by a vote of 49 Republicans, means that Warren won’t be able to speak at all in the rest of the floor debate over the nomination.
The invocation of the rule McConnell used is quite unusual, and as Derek Hawkins at the Washington Post pointed out, it wasn’t invoked against a man, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), when he accused McConnell of lying on the Senate floor in 2015. But it may not be surprising that a man silenced a woman in particular. It happens all the time outside of the Senate.
Women are constantly interrupted. One study found that both men and women are much more likely to interrupt a woman in conversation than a man; over a three-minute conversation, women interrupt men once, on average, compared to nearly three times for other women. Men interrupt other men twice and women two-and-a-half times, on average. Another more informal tally of meetings in the tech industry found that over the course of 900 minutes of conversation, men were nearly three times as likely to interrupt a woman as a fellow man, while women interrupted another woman 87 percent of the time.
Even if women participate in interrupting other women, however, it’s men who are doing the bulk of talking over people. As far back as 1975, researchers who listened in on public conversations found that in mixed gender conversations men were responsible for all but one of the interruptions. In the tech industry meetings, men spoke over someone else twice as often as women.
Men also speak much more than women in general. One study found that in meetings, men take up 75 percent of the time speaking, more than their representation in the group, leaving women with just a quarter of the meeting to talk. Another found that men with more power speak more, while women with more power speak just as infrequently as those with less.
Part of this is because women are penalized for speaking up. The latter study also found that when women do speak they are seen as less competent and less suited to leadership. Women in the study talked less to avoid a backlash, not out of a desire to help build consensus. Even though women speak less frequently than men, they are still perceived as running their mouths more. In employer feedback, female employees get two-and-a-half times the criticism that men get about their communication styles being too aggressive.
For her part, Warren doesn’t appear to have backed down after being reprimanded by her fellow senators. While she can’t speak during the rest of the debate over Sessions, she took to Twitter afterward and promised not to be silent.
I will not be silent about a nominee for AG who has made derogatory & racist comments that have no place in our justice system.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) February 8, 2017
I will not be silent while the Republicans rubber stamp an AG who will never stand up to the @POTUS when he breaks the law.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) February 8, 2017