This paper employs the ParlaMint-ES-GA dataset to scrutinize the intersection of gender, speech, and representation within the Parliament of Galicia, an autonomous region located in North-western Spain. The research questions center around the dynamics of women’s participation in parliamentary proceedings. Contrary to numerical parity, we explore whether increased female presence in the parliament correlates with equitable access to the floor. Analyzing parliamentary proceedings from 2015 to 2022, our quantitative study investigates the relationship between the legislative body’s composition, the number of speeches by Members of Parliament (MPs), and references made by MPs in their speeches. The findings reveal nuances in gender representation and participation, challenging assumptions about proportional access to parliamentary discourse.

The development of language technologies (LTs) such as machine translation, text analytics, and dialogue systems is essential in the current digital society, culture and economy. These LTs, widely supported in languages in high demand worldwide, such as English, are also necessary for smaller and less economically powerful languages, as they are a driving force in the democratization of the communities that use them due to their great social and cultural impact. As an example, dialogue systems allow us to communicate with machines in our own language; machine translation increases access to contents in different languages, thus facilitating intercultural relations; and text-to-speech and speech-to-text systems broaden different categories of users’ access to technology. In the case of Galician (co-official language, together with Spanish, in the autonomous region of Galicia, located in northwestern Spain), incorporating the language into state-of-the-art AI applications can not only significantly favor its prestige (a decisive factor in language normalization), but also guarantee citizens’ language rights, reduce social inequality, and narrow the digital divide. This is the main motivation behind the Nós Project (Proxecto Nós), which aims to have a significant contribution to the development of LTs in Galician (currently considered a low-resource language) by providing openly licensed resources, tools, and demonstrators in the area of intelligent technologies.