Women, language and politics by Sylvia Shaw explores how language use within political institutions both establishes and reinforces gendered practices and norms, as well as how the language employed in political discourses contributes towards women's underrepresentation in politics. Ambitious in scope, this book achieves these goals by focusing on UK political institutions and by offering three case studies of white, Western female politicians.

Throughout the book, Shaw calls on a wide range of data types that primarily span a twenty-year period (1998–2018), including debate recordings, ethnographic interviews, and media discourses. These are analysed through a mixed-method approach, which draws upon ‘quantitative assessments of participation’, critical discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and ethnographic descriptions.

Chapters 3 and 4 consider the structure, organisation, and (linguistic) participations of women in the UK House of Commons (HoC), the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Scottish Parliament, and the National Assembly for Wales (now known as the Senedd). Most notably, Shaw reveals that women in the HoC are frequently positioned as ‘interlopers’ and are excluded from the (cross-party) ‘fraternal networks’ established by male politicians: the HoC women appear less willing than the HoC men to make ‘illegal’ interventions (contributions which disrupt the ‘legal’ turn-taking nature of the debate), utilise as much adversarial language, engage in (sexist/sexual) humour, and so on. In contrast, female politicians in the devolved institutions are shown to ‘engage in the full range of discursive norms’ (252); nevertheless, interview data reveals that these women are still often negatively evaluated by their fellow politicians for doing so. Chapter 5 then explicitly foregrounds several barriers that may hinder women's political progress, including sexist language and sexual harassment, homosocial bonding, and the media's (under)representations of female politicians.

Chapters 6 and 7 consider the language of former UK Prime Minister Theresa May, former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, and Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee in the 2016 US presidential election. By individually examining these women's participation in political exchanges where gender issues are brought to the fore (‘critical gendered moments’) and their media representations, Shaw ultimately draws attention to multiple important similarities these women share: all three adopt adversarial communicative styles in their political performances (especially May); all three were criticised for their voices and/or speech styles (e.g. each were labelled ‘robotic’); and each put a considerable amount of effort into constructing their public personas. Chapter 8 concludes the book by proposing avenues for future research and by optimistically suggesting that directly critiquing the hurdles that women in politics often face may eventually put an end to the silencing of women within the political sphere.

The primary strength of this book lies in its close examination of female politicians’ actual linguistic performances, which Shaw herself notes has often been overlooked in previous studies in favour of just analysing media representations of female politicians. As such, this book makes a valuable contribution to the study of (women's) political discourse and is likely to appeal to those with an interest in the complex intersections of language, gender, politics, and power.