In Saskatchewan's Legislature, the story of women's representation extends beyond numerical milestones. While the rise in women's seat share is often celebrated, the real test lies in the substance of their participation: the power of their voices, the influence of their roles, and the nature of their rhetoric. What does it mean to not only occupy space but also shape the discourse? And how do institutional structures and cultural norms amplify or constrain their impact?

Drawing on extensive records from the Wheatpool Data Labs Legislative Database, this report provides a rigorous, historically contextualized examination of women’s participation in Saskatchewan’s Legislature. The findings highlight the steady growth in seat shares occupied by women, notable disparities between representation and speaking time, and the critical impact of cabinet appointments on political influence. The analysis culminates in a review of a civility index, revealing how women MLAs may be more likely to engage in respectful parliamentary discourse.

Seat Composition and Historical Turning Points

The 1919 election of Sarah Katherine Ramsland marked a pivotal, albeit isolated, milestone in Saskatchewan's political history, as she stood alone in a legislature otherwise devoid of women legislators. Over the next two decades, this absence underscored the deeply rooted political and social barriers preventing more women from entering provincial politics.

It was not until the mid-20th century that individuals such as Beatrice Janet Trew (first elected in 1944), Marjorie Alexandra Cooper (1952), and Gladys Grace Mae Strum (1960) emerged to challenge this exclusion. Their victories under the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation banner spearheaded incremental, yet meaningful, progress. By contesting traditional norms that had systematically sidelined women, they influenced broader political reforms and set the stage for expanded participation across party lines in the years that followed.

By the late 20th century, societal shifts toward gender equality, combined with internal party reforms, fostered a gradual increase in the recruitment and election of women. Despite uneven progress across parties women MLAs gained broader acceptance as legitimate contenders, though the pace of change remained inconsistent.

The data illustrate steady gains in women's representation during the 1980s and 1990s, driven in part by strategic party initiatives to promote women's candidacies. However, these increases in seat counts do not necessarily correlate with equitable influence, highlighting the need to examine the frequency and scope of women MLAs' participation in legislative debate.

From Seats to Speech: Examining Speaking Time by Gender

Although the numerical representation of women has increased markedly, deeper questions arise about substantive representation: to what extent do women MLAs participate in policy debates, budget discussions, and question periods? Leveraging an extensive record of legislative transcripts, the database provides a longitudinal perspective on words spoken by MLAs, disaggregated by party affiliation and gender.

Notably, while the Saskatchewan Party has recorded consistent growth in women's seat share, its women MLAs often speak less than their numerical proportion would suggest—a pattern pointing to entrenched hierarchies or caucus cultures that still prioritize male speakers. Conversely, the New Democratic Party, particularly in recent years, demonstrates that women MLAs sometimes exceed their proportional share of words spoken, suggesting a more egalitarian internal dynamic that may encourage women to be vocal on the legislative floor.

As an example, in the 28th Legislature (2016-2020), Saskatchewan Party women accounted for 20.4% of the caucus but just 17.2%–18.2% of the total words spoken, reflecting a modest but consistent gap in discourse. Meanwhile, in the NDP caucus of the same period, women MLAs exceeded their proportional seat share in spoken words. These findings highlight how party-specific culture, leadership support, and the assignment of ministerial or official critic roles can shape women's opportunities to command the floor.

Leadership, Cabinet Appointments, and Their Influence

Cabinet appointments are among the most visible and influential roles in government, providing ministers with an opportunity to shape policy and lead public debate. Although the province's inaugural legislature convened in 1905, it took nearly eight decades for women to enter Saskatchewan cabinet posts. Indeed, Patricia Anne Smith and Joan Heather Duncan were appointed to the Progressive Conservative cabinet in 1982—marking the earliest documented female cabinet appointments in Saskatchewan.

Historically, early women cabinet ministers were most commonly assigned to portfolios such as Social Services, Education, and Health—areas often deemed extensions of caregiving or public welfare. Although these roles were vital to governance, they also tended to mirror societal expectations about women’s “natural” responsibilities. For instance, Patricia Anne Smith served as Minister of Social Services and Education but later took on the more traditionally male-dominated Energy and Mines portfolio. Meanwhile, Joan Heather Duncan led ministries such as Government Services, Revenue, and Consumer and Commercial Affairs. While these appointments underscored women’s capabilities across multiple sectors, they also revealed how gendered norms initially circumscribed female ministers to certain policy areas, with occasional forays—like Energy and Mines—signaling incremental shifts in women’s ministerial responsibilities.

In the early 1990s, the New Democratic Party initially appointed women to portfolios traditionally associated with caregiving or public welfare—such as Social Services, Health, and Education. However, as the decade progressed, the NDP began placing women in a broader set of ministerial roles, culminating in Janice MacKinnon’s historic 1993 appointment as Saskatchewan’s first woman Minister of Finance. This signaled a departure from the longstanding norm of confining women to “social” portfolios and opened the door for subsequent assignments in areas like Economic Development, Crown Investments, Labour, Municipal Government, and Gaming. Through these expanded responsibilities, the NDP’s women cabinet ministers helped reshape Saskatchewan’s political landscape, gradually challenging and transforming gendered assumptions about governance.

From 2007 onward, the Saskatchewan Party built upon this foundation. Women such as Donna Harpauer, Nancy Heppner, Christine Tell, Laura Ross, and Bronwyn Eyre have held major cabinet portfolios, including Finance, Corrections and Policing, Social Services, Justice, and more. Notably, Donna Harpauer's long-standing tenure as Minister of Finance and Bronwyn Eyre's appointment in 2022 as the province's first woman Minister of Justice underscore a marked shift away from narrowly gendered assignments. These developments illustrate the Saskatchewan Party's ongoing commitment to entrusting women with high-level decision-making roles, paralleling the advancements driven by the NDP in preceding decades.

Together, these cabinet appointments—spanning Progressive Conservative, NDP, and Saskatchewan Party governments—highlight how women have progressively widened their sphere of influence within the province. While persistent social and institutional challenges remain, the presence of women in prominent cabinet roles demonstrates a growing recognition of their leadership capabilities, ultimately reshaping the public's expectations about who can—and should—govern.

As more women have been entrusted with portfolios central to the province's economic and social well-being, conversations around policy, budgeting, and strategic planning have likewise begun to reflect a broader range of experiences and perspectives. Women's leadership in areas like Justice, Finance, and Energy and Resources has further weakened the association of “hard” portfolios with male leadership. This is visible, for instance, in Christine Tell's leadership in Corrections and Policing, as well as Bronwyn Eyre's role as Minister of Justice and Attorney General, signifying a marked shift toward more inclusive governance structures.

Revisiting Legislative Rhetoric: The Civility Index

In order to explore how gender and rhetorical style intersect, the Wheatpool Data Labs introduced a civility index, derived from linguistic analysis on official Hansard transcripts from 1947 to 2024. This index calculates a Weighted Civility Score by measuring the presence of respectful versus derogatory language across each MLA's speeches.

We constructed the civility index by applying large language model (LLM)–based tone and sentiment analysis to each speech recorded in Hansard (1947–2024). Because detecting respectful (e.g., "polite," "cordial," "welcoming") and divisive (e.g., "mocking," "condescending," "hostile") language represents a fundamental natural language processing task, advanced LLMs can readily achieve high accuracy in this domain. After tallying the frequency of respectful and divisive expressions for each Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA), we calculated a Respectful Percentage (proportion of speeches containing respectful language) and a Divisive Percentage (proportion of speeches containing divisive language). An MLA's final civility score was derived as a weighted difference between these two metrics (Weighted Civility Score = Respectful Percentage – 3 × Divisive Percentage). To ensure robust and representative estimates, we restricted our sample to MLAs with a minimum of 250 recorded speeches.

Women MLAs—who make up just 16.3% of legislators with sufficiently large speech samples—are disproportionately represented in the top decile of civility rankings. Statistical analysis confirms this pattern is highly unlikely to occur by chance (p < .001). This suggests that women legislators may employ more respectful discourse for a variety of reasons. This could reflect a commitment to fostering collaboration, building consensus, or setting a higher standard for political dialogue. Alternatively, it may be shaped by external pressures, such as societal expectations, heightened scrutiny, or strategic efforts to navigate male-dominated legislative spaces.

Future research could strengthen these findings by employing ordinal logistic regression to analyze the relationship between gender and civility score deciles while controlling for potential confounding variables such as historical period, opposition status, party affiliation, parliamentary roles, and constituency characteristics. This approach would be particularly appropriate given the ranked nature of the data and would help isolate gender effects while accounting for other factors that might influence parliamentary discourse. Variables such as years of experience, speaking frequency, and policy domain could be incorporated to provide a more nuanced understanding of how gender intersects with other institutional and personal characteristics in shaping legislative rhetoric. Additionally, future studies might benefit from masking speaker identities during LLM analysis to prevent any potential bias in how the model evaluates language based on known speaker characteristics.