Parliaments in Focus: Language, Gender, and the Pandemic in Parliaments.

This article examines the gendered dimensions of parliamentary discourse during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bulgaria, Poland, and Slovenia by analyzing speeches of female and male Members of Parliament (MPs) using corpus linguistic and discourse methods. It finds that while female MPs more frequently address topics such as health, culture, and education, and male MPs focus more on infrastructure, there is little qualitative difference in how men and women discuss health issues, which are framed as collective social concerns. However, explicit references to "man" and "woman" in parliamentary debates reveal that gender serves as a symbolic framework through which broader sociopolitical anxieties—such as reproductive rights, violence against women, migration, and masculinity—are articulated and contested. The study highlights that despite some differences in emphasis, gender alone does not fundamentally alter crisis policymaking, though it remains a potent discursive resource in parliamentary debates within these Central and Eastern European contexts.