omarkhursheed/hansard-gendered-corpus

Hansard Gender-Matched Corpus (1803-2005)

An organized, speaker-enriched version of the Historic Hansard corpus of UK parliamentary debates: 6,783,015 speeches across 1,197,828 debates from 203 years (1803-2005) of House of Commons and House of Lords proceedings, with 89.3% speaker gender-matching coverage in the Commons.

Released with the EMNLP 2026 paper "Two Centuries of Sexism in British Parliament: A Computational Analysis of Women's Representation in the Hansard Corpus" (Khursheed, Sawkar, and KhudaBukhsh). Code, the keyword extractor, and the full datasheet are in the companion repository: https://github.com/Social-Insights-Lab/Two-Centuries-of-Sexism

The paper's classified dataset of 6,531 speeches on women's political rights is released separately: https://huggingface.co/datasets/omarkhursheed/two-centuries-of-sexism

Contents

corpus/
  speeches/speeches_YYYY.parquet   # 201 files, one per year: speech text +
                                   # speaker metadata (name, MP id, gender,
                                   # party, constituency)
  debates/debates_YYYY.parquet     # 201 files: debate-level metadata and
                                   # speaker composition
  house_members_gendered.parquet   # unified MP database with gender labels

Usage

from datasets import load_dataset

# One year of the corpus
y1918 = load_dataset("omarkhursheed/hansard-gendered-corpus",
                     data_files="corpus/speeches/speeches_1918.parquet")

# A range of years
franchise_era = load_dataset(
    "omarkhursheed/hansard-gendered-corpus",
    data_files=[f"corpus/speeches/speeches_{y}.parquet"
                for y in range(1910, 1929)])

Download everything to disk instead (~9.4 GB):

hf download omarkhursheed/hansard-gendered-corpus --repo-type dataset \
    --local-dir data --include "corpus/*"

Key statistics

Metric	Value
Total debates	1,197,828
Total speeches	6,783,015
Unique speakers (canonical names)	52,661
Commons speeches	5,575,783
Commons gender-matched	4,980,711 (89.3%)
Female MPs with speeches (Commons)	254
Male MPs with speeches (Commons)	12,395

House of Lords gender matching reaches only ~1% (mutable peerage titles); use the Commons subset for gender analyses.

Full schema, provenance, and known limitations: see DATASHEET.md in the companion GitHub repository.

Licensing

Hansard speech text is Crown/Parliamentary material under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0. Derived metadata is CC BY 4.0.

Citation

@inproceedings{khursheed2026twocenturies,
  title     = {Two Centuries of Sexism in British Parliament: A Computational
               Analysis of Women's Representation in the Hansard Corpus},
  author    = {Khursheed, Mohammad Omar and Sawkar, Mandira and
               KhudaBukhsh, Ashiqur R.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in
               Natural Language Processing},
  year      = {2026}
}