DNC Speakers: By the Numbers

In April 2015, the Barbara Lee Family Foundation (BLFF) and the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) launched Presidential Gender Watch 2016, a project to track, analyze, and illuminate gender dynamics in the 2016 presidential election. With the help of expert scholars and practitioners, Presidential Gender Watch worked for 21 months to further public understanding of how gender influences candidate strategy, voter engagement and expectations, media coverage, and electoral outcomes in campaigns for the nation’s highest executive office. The blog below was written for Presidential Gender Watch 2016, as part of our collective effort to raise questions, suggest answers, and complicate popular discussions about gender’s role in the presidential race.

Now that the Democratic National Convention has closed, we looked back to identify gender differences in total speakers and speaking time. In this post, we also compare the gender parity in convention voices between the DNC and RNC, finding that women were seen and heard more at the Democrat’s convening.

By our count, there were 236 speakers over the DNC’s four days, not counting invocations, benedictions, or narrative videos. Ten individuals spoke twice, but were counted as one. Of those 236 speakers, 119 – or 50.4 percent – were women; 117 – or 49.6 percent – were men. In comparison, women were just 26.1 percent of the 111 speakers at the RNC.

Forty-nine of the 119 female DNC speakers – or 41 percent – were currently elected women, and four more were formerly elected women. Elected officials were better represented among the men who spoke at the DNC; 62 of 117 male speakers – or 53 percent – are currently holding elected office. Twelve other men who spoke held previous elected office.

Just eight elected women, and one formerly elected woman, spoke at the RNC, representing a smaller proportion of women speakers (26 percent) than the DNC slate. The proportion of elected officials among the RNC’s male speakers was also lower (43 percent) than at the DNC, but higher than among their female counterparts.

While men and women were equally split in number among DNC speakers, there are differences in how long men and women were at the convention podium. Of about 21.5 hours of speaking time, just over 12 hours was occupied by male speakers at the DNC; women’s spoke for slightly over nine hours – 43 percent of the total speaking time – across the convention’s four days. The gender disparities in speaking time can be accounted for, in part, by the dominance of men among the individuals who spoke the longest. While Hillary Clinton spoke for about one hour, the next four longest speeches were given by men: President Barack Obama (50 minutes), former President Bill Clinton (44 minutes), Senator Tim Kaine (33 minutes), and Senator Bernie Sanders (33 minutes).

The gender disparities in speaking time were greater at the RNC, where women spoke for just 24 percent of the total time; even excluding the nominees (Trump and Pence), 72 percent of the speaking time was given to men.