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Women MPs and the Media: Representing the Body Politic
... A number of studies have demonstrated that female candidates receive less campaign coverage than men (Kahn,1994a;Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996;Valenzuela & Correa, 2009). More specifically, Blackburn (2018) found that Trump received 14% more reporting than Clinton in a study of legacy media coverage during the 2016 campaign. ...
... Studies have shown that female politicians often receive less coverage compared to their male opponents (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996;Valenzuela & Correa, 2009) and that their campaigns are taken less seriously by the media (Byerly & Ross, 2006;Kahn, 1994a;Kahn & Goldenburg, 1991;Ross, 2002Ross, , 2004. H1: Female candidates received significantly less news coverage than male candidates in newspaper headlines. ...
... First, the female candidates virtually disappeared from newspaper headlines during the study timeline -they were only covered in 12.3% of the news headlines in comparison to 83.8% for the male candidates (see Figure 1). This supports the findings of previous studies where both female presidential candidates (Clinton and Dole) and gubernatorial candidates receive less coverage than males (Blackburn, 2018;Gidengil & Everitt, 2000;Kahn,1994a;Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996;Valenzuela & Correa, 2009). This is significant because Elizabeth Warren had been tied in voter preference with Joe Biden in the fall of 2019, but by the time of caucuses and primary elections, her name was rarely mentioned in headlines in comparison to her male counterparts Democratic Presidential Nomination, 2020. ...
This study content analyzed 1,215 headlines from 63 newspapers in the U.S. on presidential candidates from the Iowa Caucuses to Super Tuesday in the 2020 Primary elections. The findings indicate that female candidates receive significantly less coverage than male candidates, which confirm the previous studies of female politicians in the media. However, study results also suggest female candidates are making progress in terms of negative, positive, active, and passive framing in media spaces.
... Media depictions of politicians have historically reinforced the masculine underpinnings of political leadership. The gendered mediation thesis asserts that journalists apply a masculine lens when covering politics (Gidengil and Everitt 2000;Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ross 1996). They do so by treating politics like a sport (Lawrence 2000) and prioritizing policy issues associated with men, such as the economy and defense (Kahn and Goldenberg 1991;Meeks 2012). ...
... It examines how journalists draw on gender stereotypes when shaping narratives about political actors. Sreberny- Mohammadi and Ross (1996) have argued that masculine assumptions inform the way journalists cover politics and undermine women as legitimate political actors. The gendered mediation thesis advanced by Gidengil and Everitt (2000, 105-6) conceptualizes how masculine assumptions work in political reporting: ...
... Less emphasized in news stories are a premier's likability, honesty, intelligence, and compassion. These results provide initial support for assertions that political journalism is inherently masculine in outlook (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ross 1996). Journalists pay close attention to the ways in which premiers embody leadership qualities associated with men, such as experience and strength, but less so to those traits associated with women, such as likability, honesty, and compassion. ...
How do the media depict the leadership abilities of government leaders, and in what ways are these depictions gendered? Does the focus of leadership evaluations change over time, reflecting the increased presence of women in top leadership roles? To answer these questions, we examined news coverage of 22 subnational government leaders in Australia and Canada, countries in which a significant number of women have achieved the premiership at the state or provincial level since 2007. Analysis demonstrates that newly elected women and men leaders receive approximately the same number of leadership evaluations. Women are assessed based on the same criteria as men. All subnational political leaders are expected to be competent, intelligent, and levelheaded. That journalists prioritize experience and strength while downplaying honesty and compassion indicates a continued emphasis on “masculine” leadership norms in politics. Yet evaluations of new premiers have emphasized the traditionally “feminine” trait of collaboration as key to effective leadership and, over time, have given more attention to likability and emotions when covering male premiers. As our analysis reveals, media conceptualizations of political leadership competencies are slowly expanding in ways that make it easier for women to be seen as effective political leaders.
... Existing studies on how women are framed in the media can be classified into two broad areas. Some studies focus on the gendered mediation thesis, which places women at a disadvantage in political reportage using masculine filters/norms (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996). Most gendered mediation research has examined media coverage of personal/social characteristics; however, it is slowly turning its attention to the potential gendering of more substantive aspects of coverage, such as a politician's leadership abilities (e.g., Wagner et al., 2022). ...
... The newspapers' emphasis on her leadership resonates with previous studies in Australia, Liberia, Germany, Chile and Canada (Cantrell & Ingrid Bachmann, 2008;Semetko & Boomgaarden, 2007;Wagner et al., 2022). Except for the fifth and sixth frames, all three newspapers took a positive approach to frame VP Harris, contravening previous arguments about the media alienating women (especially minority women) in politics (e.g., Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996). Their positive approach may be attributable to VP Harris's experience and their individual ideologies. ...
The media's portrayal of women in politics is crucial in shaping public perceptions of their effective leadership. While previous research has focused on the negative impact of stereotypical framing on women's political engagement, this study takes a novel approach. We conduct an in-depth analysis of how international newspapers covered Vice President Kamala Harris in her first year, revealing a surprisingly optimistic narrative. The coverage emphasized her legislative impact, pandemic management, advocacy, diplomacy, performance and social identity. This unique perspective has significant implications for the praxis of women's coverage, political communication and media studies, which we delve into in this paper.
... The first generation of studies showed that women politicians receive less media coverage than their male counterparts and pointed out substantial differences in the coverage of male and female politicians in terms of the tone, language, and subject matter of the coverage (see, e.g., Braden, 1996;Kahn, 1994;Norris, 1996). The studies showed that the media omitted, trivialized, condemned, or domesticated women MPs (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996). News stories about women paid more attention to their personality traits and appearance, while the coverage of men concentrated on their abilities (Heldman et al., 2005). ...
... Nonetheless, as the studies above show, the media reinforces and sustains rather than challenges existing social relations (Garcia-Blanco & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2012). This gender mediation reflects an orientation that treats the practice of politics as an essentially male pursuit, and it is complicit in the perpetuation of public perceptions of politics as constitutively male (Norris, 1996;Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996;Verge & Pastor, 2018). ...
This study joins recent studies that explore the meanings of the political representation of women resulting from a gender quota, through examination of their media representation. Drawing on studies on gendered mediation and women's political representation and using a content analysis method, we examine the quantity and the quality of gender media representation of Egyptian members of parliament. The findings show a nuanced picture in which the media simultaneously propagates a conservative perspective alongside progressive and egalitarian ones. Female representatives receive less media coverage and are associated with feminine topics in a way that reproduces the gender hierarchical masculine/feminine and private/public distinction within the political sphere. Nevertheless, this biased coverage coexists with an empowering representation whereby women are more heard than seen and associated with core parliamentary activities. We conclude by addressing the potential and limits of this representation, which may alter perceptions regarding women's political participation under authoritarianism.
... The issue was trivialised and stereotyped along gender-based evaluations. This finding supports Jenkins' (2002) and Sreberny- Mohammadi and Ross's (1996) observations in Australia and Britain, respectively, which reveal media reports of female politicians as focusing on gender-based evaluations such as outward appearance and fashion sense. ...
... This study has shown that the portrayal of political actors in Nigeria by the print media is gendered. This finding corroborates the findings of other studies (Braden 1996;Motion1996;Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ross 1996;Media Monitoring Project 1999;Lawrence 2004;Jenkins 2002) in other parts of the world. The study has further revealed that public perception including those of women is in support of this gendered portrayal. ...
... The second trait that made these politicians comparable was the treatment they received in the news media along the gendered lines identified by Norris (1997) and others (e.g. Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ross, 1996) more than two decades ago. For instance, around the time under investigation, journalists reported on May's passion for shoes (Hawkes and Cole, 2016), her legs (Vine, 2017) and her reputation for being a 'bloody difficult woman' (Wooding, 2016) rather than her experience and qualifications. ...
... This category grouped the different styles and language that Ardern, Clinton and May used in their online communication, in order to find out how they presented themselves and whether they used masculinist, adversarial discursive norms (Walsh, 2001) or a more consensual leadership style. Historically, women have favoured the latter (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ross, 1996) but were forced to adopt the former. This was not due to their biological makeup (indeed Thatcher embraced adversarial vernacular 9 ; Fairclough, 2015), but because of the performative expectations of politics as a male endeavour and the double bind that came with them. ...
Digital optimists have claimed that Internet technology, and especially social media, would revolutionise politics and empower previously marginalised groups. The reality is somewhat different: online like offline politics is the preserve of narrow elite of mostly men, while women are still less likely to discuss politics online. This article offers a comparative study of Theresa May, Hillary Clinton and Jacinda Ardern’s political communications. It investigates whether they used digital technologies during elections to feminise politics and evaluates the extent to which women politicians adopt leadership and communicative styles that challenge masculine norms of political behaviour, whether they prioritise policy areas that are likely to make a difference in women’s lives and if they speak on behalf of other women.
... Primeiras-ministras e presidentes saíram do jogo da política e o abismo da participação feminina em debates políticos domésticos e internacionais parece ter se aprofundado. O papel da mídia de reproduzir valores sexistas e patriarcais em cada país é uma das causas estruturais desse processo (Campus, 2010;Campus, 2013;Wright;Holland, 2014;Sreberny-Mohammadi;Ross, 1996;Walsh, 1998). Mas até que ponto a imprensa teria capacidade de criar representações além das fronteiras e universalizar as percepções sobre as mulheres à frente de seus Estados? ...
... Primeiras-ministras e presidentes saíram do jogo da política e o abismo da participação feminina em debates políticos domésticos e internacionais parece ter se aprofundado. O papel da mídia de reproduzir valores sexistas e patriarcais em cada país é uma das causas estruturais desse processo (Campus, 2010;Campus, 2013;Wright;Holland, 2014;Sreberny-Mohammadi;Ross, 1996;Walsh, 1998). Mas até que ponto a imprensa teria capacidade de criar representações além das fronteiras e universalizar as percepções sobre as mulheres à frente de seus Estados? ...
Nos últimos anos lideranças políticas femininas perderam a disputa pelo poder em vários países e outras foram afastadas de seus cargos. Primeiras-ministras e presidentes saíram do jogo da política e o abismo da participação feminina voltou a se aprofundar. O presente artigo tem como objetivo compreender, a partir do comparativo entre a renúncia da primeira-ministra australiana Julia Gillard, ocorrida em 2013 e o impeachment da presidente brasileira Dilma Rousseff, ocorrido em 2016, como a imprensa internacional contribuiu para criar representações além das fronteiras e universalizar as percepções sobre as mulheres à frente de seus Estados. Palavras-chave: Mídia; Gênero; Feminismo; Dilma Rousseff; Julia Gillard. En los últimos años líderes políticos femeninos perdieron la disputa por el poder en varios países y otras fueron alejadas de sus puestos. Primeras ministras y presidentes salieron del juego de la política y el abismo de la participación femenina se ha profundizado. El presente artículo tiene como objetivo comprender, a partir del comparativo entre la renuncia de la primera ministra australiana Julia Gillard, ocurrida en 2013 y el impeachment de la presidenta brasileña Dilma Rousseff, ocurrido en 2016, como la prensa internacional contribuyó a crear representaciones además de las fronteras y universalizar las percepciones sobre las mujeres al frente de sus Estados. Palabras clave: Medios; Género; Femenino; Dilma Rousseff; Julia Gillard. In recent years female political leaders have lost the power struggle in several countries of the world and others have been removed from their offices. Prime ministers and presidents have left the game of politics and the abyss of female participation in public debates have deepened after a period of optimism about what seemed to be the beginning of a movement to reduce inequality of gender representation. This article aims to understand, from the comparison between the resignation of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2013 and the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff in 2016, how the international press helped to create representations beyond borders and universalize perceptions about women ahead of their States.
... The media often portrays women politicians in a biased manner, focusing on their appearance or personal lives rather than their policies and competencies. Women politicians also receive less media coverage than their male counterparts, leading to lower public recognition and support (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996). ...
... Για τη μελέτη των αναπαραστάσεων των γυναικών πολιτικών στα ΜΜΕ και την ερμηνεία της κυριαρχίας της έμφυλης παρουσίασης σε αυτά, αξιοποιείται η θεωρία της έμφυλης διαμεσολάβησης. Η έμφυλη διαμεσολάβηση βασίζεται στην υπόθεση ότι ο τρόπος με τον οποίο παρουσιάζεται η πολιτική καθορίζεται από μια ατζέντα αρσενικά προσανατολισμένη που πριμοδοτεί την άσκηση της πολιτικής σαν μια, ουσιαστικά, αρσενική επιδίωξη (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross 1996). Η εικόνα και η γλώσσα της διαμεσολαβούμενης πολιτικής, επομένως, υποστηρίζει το status quo (το αρσενικό ως νόρμα) και θεωρεί τις γυναίκες πολιτικούς ως «καινοτομίες» ή -κάποιες φορές -ακόμα και ως αποκλίνουσες περιπτώσεις (Ross & Sreberny 2000). ...
Το παρόν κείμενο παρουσιάζει συνδυαστικά τα βασικότερα ευρήματα τριών ερευνών που χρησιμοποίησαν ως θεωρητικό υπόβαθρο τις φεμινιστικές προσεγγίσεις και για τις οποίες αναλύθηκαν 765 άρθρα εφημερίδων, 763 άρθρα ειδησεογραφικών ιστοσελίδων (για την πρώτη έρευνα), 216 δελτία ειδήσεων για τη διερεύνηση των αναπαραστάσεων των γυναικών πολιτικών (για τη δεύτερη έρευνα) και 458 τηλεοπτικά προγράμματα ενημέρωσης (δελτία ειδήσεων κι ενημερωτικές εκπομπές) για την έμφυλη βία (για την τρίτη έρευνα. Με τη μέθοδο της ανάλυσης περιεχομένου επιχειρείται η ποσοτική καταγραφή των σχετικών τάσεων στα ΜΜΕ.
... According to this thesis, 'news consistently upholds the public man/private woman binary by situating women as anomalous outsiders to politics' (Trimble 2017: 10). Conventional news frames treat the male as normative, and the use of stereotypically masculine imagery subtly serves to reinforce the perception that women do not really belong in politics (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross 1996). ...
This paper explores the processes of gender construction in political communication as reflected in the Bangladeshi media. It examines the coverage of female candidates during the 2018 general elections in four national Bengali-language newspapers using framing analysis and discourse analysis. It also includes interviews of nine women Members of Parliament to understand their response to the media coverage they do or do not receive in the national press, their own approaches to the media, and suggestions towards making the press more gender-sensitive in its political coverage. Based on the concept of gendered mediation, analysis of the media and interviews of women parliamentarians revealed that women politicians were framed in relation to male mentors; as new, inexperienced and potentially incompetent; and as representatives of women voters only. The findings suggest that the media should promote women more positively in politics by raising awareness of the presence, strength and efforts of women politicians, by covering in depth and evaluating their efforts, accomplishments and impact.
... A growing number of scholars examining the media coverage of politics have drawn on gendered mediation literature to examine how this coverage reinforces gender norms and power relations. Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ross (1996), who first coined the term "gendered mediation," argue that the media is neither objective nor neutral but rather frames politics through a maleoriented agenda that privileges male politicians while disadvantaging women. Previous research has shown how the media emphasise masculine traits, behaviours, and stereotypes (Gidengil & Everitt, 1999), how women politicians are delegitimised in portrayals that draw on stereotypically feminine characteristics (Falk, 2013;Johnson, 2013;Trimble, 2017;Williams, 2021a) and how such an undue focus on gender, appearance, and personal life can serve to other these women from the (masculine) political norm (Ross & Sreberny-Mohammadi, 2000;Thomas & Bittner, 2017). ...
The Covid-19 pandemic has repeatedly been framed by politicians and the media alike as this generation’s “Great War.” Metaphors are often used in political reportage as effective discursive tools to influence and persuade readers. War metaphors especially are frequently used in election campaigns, leadership spills, and during times of political unrest to portray politics as a brutal and competitive (masculine) arena. As such, the use of militaristic language and war metaphors to describe the shared challenges during a global pandemic is unsurprising. Framing the pandemic as a war can rally citizens by appealing to their sense of national and civic duty at a moment of crisis. Yet such framing is problematic as it draws on stereotyping cultural myths and values associated with war, reinforcing patriarchal understandings of bravery and service that glorify hegemonic masculinity while excluding women from the public sphere. Using a feminist critical discourse analysis, this article will examine Australian print media coverage of the first six months of the Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on two case studies—the prime minister and “frontline” workers—to further understand the gender bias of mainstream media. We argue that, by drawing on war metaphors in Covid-19 coverage which emphasizes protective masculinity, the media reproduce and re-enforce political and societal gender stereotypes and imbalances.
... However, other studies did not find a correlation between an increase in women in editing positions and a feminist view of content. According to the gendered-mediation thesis, only having more women in the newsrooms will not change a gender imbalance rooted in the habits and minds of most journalists (Ross, 2002;Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996). Also, Leiva and Kimber (2022, p. 15) note that "being a female newspaper section editor does not affect the proportions of male and female sources used by newswriters." ...
Despite journalism’s commitment to ethical principles such as accuracy, humanity and diversity, compliance with the gender perspective in content is still minimal in approximately one hundred countries. This inequality reinforces misperceptions, imbalances, and perceived differences between men and women. To address this situation, from 2010 to 2021, eight Spanish media companies appointed a new editorial position responsible for self-regulating gender equality. This qualitative study focused on 10 journalists who currently exercise or have exercised that job, to detect, describe and propose the implementation of this new professional role. This study suggests that gender editing has advanced equality in parity of sourcing and the presence of women in the opinion sections, but implementation of equality in overall content is more difficult. Gender editors’ daily work is hampered by a lack of management support and an absence of independence in editorial decisions.
... Examining the demand-side arguments first, the two dominant narratives regarding gender inequality in political news emphasize different aspects of the news production process. The first stresses the importance of informal, same-gender networks in a context where a majority of journalists (and politicians) are still male (Aalberg and Strömbäck 2011, 170-1;Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ross 1996;Van der Pas and Aaldering 2020, 117). In very simple terms, the point is that male journalists tend to favor male sources in their networks. ...
Research continues to find gender inequality in politics and political communication, but our understanding of the variation in the degree of bias across systems is limited. A recent meta-analysis reveals how, in countries with proportional representation (PR), the media pay considerably more attention to men politicians. In plurality systems, this bias is absent. The present study proposes a new explanation for this finding, emphasizing how the size of electoral districts moderates both the demand for and supply of women politicians in news reporting. Analyzing more than 600,000 news appearances made by Norwegian and British MPs from 2000 to 2016, we produce a detailed picture of gender biases in news visibility that speaks in favor of single-member districts in plurality systems. Although PR is generally recognized as advantageous for the political representation of women, our findings call for a more nuanced understanding of the link between electoral systems and gender equality.
... Previous scholars have shown the media influences governance and political practices (Adcock, 2010). Media professionals are the gatekeepers for the public's access to information, and media coverage about a particular institution or event can be used to reinforce cultural norms (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996;Trimble, 2013). After completing critical discourse analysis of the newspaper articles (n=28) in this data set, the authors arrived at three major categories of findings, summarized in the following emergent themes: (1.) ambivalent coverage of the BLM movement, (2.) an emphasis on the methods of mobilization, (3.) far reaching impacts of the BLM movement, and (4.) an insistence on foregrounding the free speech debate. ...
... The gender of politicians often determines the choice of metaphors. More often than not, feminist scholars claim that the use of bodily metaphors situates women as outsiders to political life (Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ross 1996;Trimble 2017). ...
This article considers the historical and ongoing use of gendered anthropomorphic metaphors in Canadian political humor. It asks how national and sub-national identities have been articulated through gendered bodies in Canadian political humor and what types of underlying cultural and ideological assumptions about citizenship are expressed in these metaphors? Two case studies of Canadian political humor were conducted and analysed through the lens of feminist critical discourse analysis. The findings reveal a tendency for political humor to use anthropomorphic metaphors to enforce cultural understandings of acceptable and unacceptable forms of citizenship. These discussions are highly gendered and often exist in conversation with intersectional issues such as race and class. Overall, these metaphors enforce the acceptability of white masculinity in Canadian social, political, and cultural rhetoric while framing femininity as a precursor to undesirable forms of citizenship.
... As women have historically been regarded outsiders in the political sphere, the question arose whether news media are similarly gendered in reinforcing a male political norm (e.g. Kahn, 1994;Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ross, 1996). Research has confirmed this, illustrating that women politicians are less often present in the news (e.g. and more often subject to coverage that highlights gender and places them within the realm of the private sphere (e.g. ...
The present study explores gendered representations in Belgian electoral news coverage. Compared to other Western countries, Belgium has consistently reported a small share of female politicians in the news, offering limited insights into the ways they are portrayed. Starting from the observation that the (mainly Anglo-Saxon) body of work on women politicians’ representation has reported mixed findings, the study intends to provide a more comprehensive analysis by taking political and contextual factors into account. By means of a quantitative content analysis, we monitored news content prior to the 2019 Belgian elections, resulting in a sample of 981 television, newspaper, radio and web-based news items. The findings confirm the persistence of gendered patterns in Belgian news content, regardless of a candidate’s political characteristics. Women were less often represented and their gender, appearance and family life were more often highlighted. Whereas a candidate’s political power provided additional insights into gendering, some differences in coverage between candidates could not be explained by either sex or political characteristics. Lastly, differences between media were limited, though web-based news was more negative in tone.
... According to Sreberny-Mohammadi and Ross (1996), the political representation of women rests on two principles: allowing them to speak in the political arena, and actually showing them in the media. Since the 1980s, researchers have called attention to a tendency to devote less media attention to female candidates (Gingras, 1995;Stanley, 2012), which leads to what Tuchman (1978) calls women's "symbolic annihilation" from the public sphere. ...
This article investigates the representativeness of news coverage when there are nearly as many female candidates as there are male candidates by considering the 2018 Québec Election, in which 47 per cent of candidates were women. We are interested not only in the magnitude of the coverage (that is, the volume of press coverage received by each candidate) but also in its tone (if the press coverage is negative or positive) and whether these parameters fluctuate based on the gender of the candidates. We know that the quality of the news coverage, and more specifically its tone, can affect voting intentions. We also know that journalists routinely portray politics as a masculine activity, but we know very little about the coverage that local female candidates receive in the context of parity in North America. We find that in spite of exceptional circumstances, female candidates received significantly less coverage than men.
... Furthermore, previous scholars have shown the media influences governance and political practices (Adcock, 2010). Media professionals are the gatekeepers for the public's access to information, and media coverage about an institution or event can be used to reinforce cultural norms (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996;Trimble, Wagner, Sampert, Raphael, & Gerrits, 2013). ...
... Khan's (1991Khan's ( , 1994, Braden's (1996), and Norris's (1997) ground-breaking work on the representation of candidates in successive American elections in the 1990s re-asserted Tuchman and colleagues' (1978) much earlier statement that women were being "symbolically annihilated" in the news -women politicians as much as any other women. Studies of the European scene in the same decade, including work on the European Elections in 1994, demonstrated similarly depressing findings (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996). What these studies describe are exclusions and trivialisations: comparisons with male politicians reveal not simply issues of absence of women, but issues of more negative tone and story focus when women are covered in the news. ...
Research studies over at least the last three decades have consistently demonstrated that women are under-represented in news, both as sources and subjects, and as reporters and presenters, in relation to their presence in any given population. If we focus more explicitly on a particular category of women, namely politicians, we observe precisely the same problem, despite their potentially greater newsworthiness as elite actors. Many women politicians, including women who hold the top political job of prime minister or president, are not only under-reported, but when they do feature in news discourse, they are often trivialised, sexualised, or commodified, their sex seeming to be the most interesting thing about them from the perspective of journalists. In this chapter, we look at the relationship of women, politics, and news and explore some of the reasons why the representation of political women seems so problematic.
... Khan's (1991Khan's ( , 1994, Braden's (1996), and Norris's (1997) ground-breaking work on the representation of candidates in successive American elections in the 1990s re-asserted Tuchman and colleagues' (1978) much earlier statement that women were being "symbolically annihilated" in the news -women politicians as much as any other women. Studies of the European scene in the same decade, including work on the European Elections in 1994, demonstrated similarly depressing findings (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996). What these studies describe are exclusions and trivialisations: comparisons with male politicians reveal not simply issues of absence of women, but issues of more negative tone and story focus when women are covered in the news. ...
The lack of women’s voices, status, and recognition in the news media is a challenge to both human rights and a sustainable future. Comparing Gender and Media Equality across the Globe addresses longstanding questions in the study of gender equality in media content and media organizations across countries and over time. Drawing on data from the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP), European Institute for Gender Equality (EIGE), and the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), this book offers new insights into the qualities, causes, and consequences of gender equality in and through the news media. The book contributes to the to the critical discussion on gender and journalism, showing that the news media do not reflect reality when it comes when it comes to the actual the actual progress of gender equality gender equality in in societies across the globe. The study aims to inspire future research by making existing data on gender and news media equality available to the global research community. The book presents the GEM-dataset, comprising hundreds of indicators on media and gender, and the GEM-Index, an easy to use measure to keep track of key aspects of gender equality in television, radio, newspapers, and online. in television, radio, newspapers, and online. The book is edited by Monika Djerf-Pierre and Maria Edström and is published with Open Acess.
Link to download:
https://www.nordicom.gu.se/en/publikationer/comparing-gender-and-media-equality-across-globe
Drawing on studies of gendered mediation and women’s political representation, this study explores the implications of using gender quotas to facilitate women’s political representation on their portrayal in the media. Focused on the coverage of Egyptian female members of parliament in the daily newspaper al-Masry al-Yawm, the study employs feminist content analysis to examine more than two thousand news articles across three parliamentary terms (2012–2022). The article reveals a heightened visibility that challenges patriarchal stereotypes and legitimizes women as political actors. However, this coverage exists within an authoritarian setting, where the media’s compliance with government narratives subtly upholds the regime’s image. This, in turn, may limit the empowering effect of such visibility, especially among regime critics, highlighting the complex role the media plays in mirroring and molding power relations and in the negotiation of gender perceptions.
The final season of Veep follows fictional former US Vice-President and President Selina Meyer’s quest for re-election. Airing in 2019, it was the only season written and filmed during the Trump presidency. As the showrunners state, the aim of the show is to explore a political sensibility, rather than drawing explicit direct comparisons between Meyer and Trump. Selina Meyer stands in stark contrast to many of the other (post)feminist heroines of quality television, who often make their mark through being very competent at their jobs and invite comparison to former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. In many ways, Selina Meyer is the anti-Hillary Clinton. Meyer’s mismanagement of her workplace is fundamental to the construction of her as incompetent and is in stark contrast to the image she tries to convey to prospective voters. In television and media and political life more broadly, women have been constructed as saviours of democracies in crisis. Veep does not offer the same illusion of empowerment that other quality television shows offer. Veep’s gender and workplace politics can thus be understood as a critique of the narrative of the White woman saviour and demonstrate the limitations of White mainstream liberal feminism in the age of populism.
The article analyzes debut interviews of female Israeli politicians, in which the interviewees are faced with questions or statements that imply that their gender, ethniticity or background prevent them from fulfilling their function as politicians successfully, in accordance with the "Gendered mediation thesis" (GoodYear-Grant 2013). We focus on the interviewees' responses to these questions, and particularly on how grammatically negative utterances are deployed in the service of coping with the presuppositions directed at them. The analysis indicates that the negative utterances do not carry the full weight of rejection of implied presuppositions. Moreover, in some cases negative utterances are used by the speakers as part of a hedging strategy. By describing the role of negation in debut interviews of female Israeli politicians, the paper aims to advance a more comprehensive understanding of linguistic patterns used by women, and other silenced groups, to cope with biased representation.
This study uses quantitative and qualitative methods to examine Alberta newspaper coverage of the Wildrose Party’s 2009 leadership contest. We compared the overall visibility of the two candidates, Danielle Smith and Mark Dyrholm, and contrasted news framing of their public and private personas and assessments of their ideological positions and leadership skills. Smith was more visible than her male opponent, reflecting her front-runner status during the leadership race. Somewhat surprisingly, Smith was not framed as a woman candidate, nor were evaluations of her performance marked by sexism or gender stereotypes. We argue that these findings are atypical and other women leadership contenders are not likely to receive the glowingly positive assessments Smith enjoyed. Smith’s conservative ideological position, and the possibility that she had the skills and public appeal necessary to topple the longstanding governing party, prompted the remarkably adulatory coverage accorded her candidacy by the Alberta press corps.
When former British Prime Minister Theresa May resigned in May (Citation2019), in the first few days much mainstream and social media coverage focused on the tears she cried. Newspapers highlighted her tears as an extraordinary act for a politician. Her unexpected display of emotions was met with sympathy, sometimes even considered a feminist political moment, and often contextualised the framing of May’s political legacy. Analysing UK mainstream tabloid and broadsheet coverage following May’s resignation, this paper explores the media reactions in more detail. A dominant theme in the assessment of May’s legacy was her perceived inability to “get Brexit done.” Any deployment of feminist celebrations of public female tears was quickly overtaken by coverage that constructs May as politically and personally fragile, rooted in a known range of sexist tropes that associate femininity in politics with weakness. This “feminine weakness” is the opposite of what is needed to fulfil the Brexit project, which is often described in masculinist terms. Thus, Brexit is constructed as inherently masculine, and women are considered a threat to this project, highlighting the ways in which Brexit is mediated as a gendered political process. This article argues for greater attention to the role media play in the gendering of populist discourse.
The media plays a crucial role in shaping public opinion concerning political leaders by either selecting or negating what to report. Extensive research has shown that apart from informing the public about issues of interest, the media is a socio-political institution responsible for framing events and issues to influence the audience engagement with news. This article reports on a study that used a qualitative case study approach to investigate how Independent Online (IOL) and News24 frames were used to either legitimise or de-legitimise the political and leadership qualities of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma who was appointed as the Minister of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation on 27 February 2018. The study interrogated whether IOL and News24 frames reinforced the gender biases normally assigned to South African women in the news. The two key questions asked in the study were: “How were Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma's leadership and political characteristics portrayed by the media?” and “Did the portrayal of Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma evoke any gendered media biases?” An analysis of 100 electronic online news articles purposively retrieved from IOL and News24 archives was conducted. The study identified that the media evoked cultural constituted frames that were replete with gender stereotypes to discredit Dlamini-Zuma's leadership and political qualities. Thus, the study has contributed to research on the framing of women leaders by demonstrating how IOL and News24 frames were infused with gendered stereotypes.
Le Québec a vécu lors des élections générales d’octobre 2018 un « moment paritaire enchanté », où la construction d’un discours fondé sur la valeur ajoutée des femmes à la démocratie est apparue profitable chez les candidates et les chef·fe·s de parti, et ce, grâce à la mobilisation d’acteurs extérieurs au champ politique (groupes de femmes, médias, sondeurs). À partir d’une analyse d’un corpus médiatique couvrant les six mois précédant les élections, cet article montre que les propos tenus par les candidates et les chef·fe·s de parti sur les « qualités typiquement féminines » des politiciennes et leur capacité à « faire de la politique autrement » participent d’une stratégie d’argumentation qui réduit les femmes à leur rôle de genre. Alors que les conditions sociales et politiques en présence les y encourageaient fortement, la mise en valeur de la « féminité » s’est imposée comme une contrainte supplémentaire pour les candidates, qui, pour entrer dans un univers (encore) largement dominé par les hommes, devaient répondre aux attentes liées à la fois à leur genre et à leur profession.
The Praise for a ‘Caretaker’ Leader
Studies on media coverage of women politicians have underlined how the media contribute to the association of the figure of the political leader with masculinity. Yet, the social construction of leadership seems to evolve towards a more ‘femininity-inclusive’ definition. Research on the ‘glass cliff’ phenomenon suggests that stereotypical feminine attributes might be expected from political leaders in a time of crisis. We investigated the gendered construction of political leadership in the press in a COVID-19 context through the case of former Belgian Prime minister Sophie Wilmès. In line with the ‘think crisis-think female’ association, our discourse analysis shows an appreciation of traditionally feminine traits, and particularly care-related qualities, in the evaluation of what a ‘good’ leader should be in pandemic times, although some characteristics traditionally associated with masculinity are still considered valuable assets in the journalistic portrayal of Wilmès’ leadership.
This book has aimed to explore the strategising and communication of leadership in contemporary British elections, particularly relating to the campaign trail. What this chapter does is to reflect on the findings developed over previous chapters by taking influence from the range of data sources as well as the extensive data collection used here in relation to the importance of leadership as both a strategic and a communicatory tool. In doing so, it is possible to identify the importance of leadership in attracting attention, providing frames of reference and understanding the way in which leaders—and those around them—are framed by the press for public consumption.
This chapter uses a dataset covering nine newspapers over four elections, identifying mentions of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders. It explores reporting on leadership—not only the prominence of particular leaders but also which dimensions of politics and election campaigning are articulated through the prism of leadership. It develops an understanding of the context surrounding reporting on leadership and what it is about leaders that the press pay attention to. It also converges with the other chapters in the book in understanding the outward-facing function of leader visits, by exploring their appearance in the national press for the first time. This enables an understanding of which visits cut through to become newsworthy and their importance as a framing tool for election reporting.
Women’s breakthroughs in public office provide a stage for the symbolic re-enactment of ideas about women’s political presence and about gendered social constructions related to women’s and men’s leadership qualities. Drawing on gendered mediation studies in print media and using content and discourse analysis, we investigate the symbolic representation in editorial cartoons of women occupying for the first time historically male-dominated political offices. Our empirical analysis of the Spanish case finds no systematic symbolic annihilation of these historic firsts. Women’s political breakthroughs are more often acknowledged than omitted but their portrayal is not free from trivialization, particularly by conservative cartoonists, who are also more likely to condemn trailblazers to scandalize gender quotas. In a more positive light, gendered mediation seems to present a decreasing trend, thanks to both the normalization of women’s political presence and the rising public prominence of the feminist movement.
This paper considers media coverage of the clothes chosen by early women MPs. Opening with the very recent case of public outrage sparked by the dress choice of Labour MP Tracy Brabin, it suggests that a disproportionate attention to what women wear in Parliament rather than what they do there is a longstanding phenomenon. Looking at examples from the 1920s, the first decade of women MPs, it demonstrates how political women have consistently been described in terms of their appearance much more than their policies. The article considers the extent to which a tendency to present women MPs as a unified group added to this, and the challenges of agreeing on a suitable feminine parliamentary dress code as well as a landmark legal case which viewed their dress as a matter of legitimate public interest.
Australia’s first woman prime minister, Julia Gillard, experienced widespread sexism and misogyny in the media coverage of her ascension. Only a decade previously New Zealand’s first elected woman prime minister, Helen Clark, rose to the top job with comparably little gendered coverage. This article compares how the print media portrayed Gillard and Clark in the first three weeks of their respective prime ministerial terms to understand why, despite both being leaders from centre-left Labor/Labour parties, there was such a significant difference in their media treatment. Three newspapers from each country were analysed using a feminist content analysis, in addition to interviews conducted with Gillard and Clark, to understand why this was the case. This study establishes that there were two key reasons: the political context in which both leaders ascended and the stark differences in the print media landscapes, particularly the conservatism of the Australian press.
There is a lot of evidence about gender bias in the media, but not clear evidence about its causes. In this article, we study the influence of journalist’s gender and editor’s gender on gender bias in Chilean press through time. Based on content analysis of 2,645 news articles from Chilean leading newspapers and logistics regression, results confirm the relevance of the gender of both, journalists and editors, on the presence of gender bias in Chilean press, being a permanent behavior through time. Our research supports that the more women in the newsrooms, the greater women’s representation by the news media.
This chapter interrogates the specific, racialised ways in which contemporary media seems to increasingly celebrate women’s speech that is ‘transgressive’ and ‘misbehaving’. It considers the alt-right media personality Katie Hopkins, arguing that she co-opts simplistic histories of women’s silencing, including the figure of the persecuted witch, in order to position herself as a ‘brave’ and ‘trailblazing’ woman who is radically transgressing gendered communicative norms. It then moves to consider the example of Yassmin Abdel-Magied, the Sudanese-Australian media personality, who was subject to an extreme backlash following her expression of ‘controversial’ opinions about Australian military history. The juxtaposition of these two case studies illuminates the racism that undergirds judgements about who gets to speak in ‘transgressive’ ways, or to claim that they are being ‘silenced’ by contemporary ‘witch-hunts’, and underscores the importance of an intersectional approach to communicative injustice.
This concluding chapter summarises the book’s key arguments and sets out some of the central features of communicative injustice. Engaging with theories of communicative disability which show how ‘fucked up’ our dominant communicative norms are (Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness, 2018), it argues that inequalities and injustices of voice are even worse than we already take them to be; the hope for change comes precisely from the insights that radical despair—or respair—can grant. It ends by considering the radical possibilities of communicative failure. Arguing that the rules of the communicative game are set up in such a way that renders most of us bound to fail, it asks what possibilities might follow if, instead of trying to ‘train up’ our voices as individuals, we broke down the existing circuits of communication.
Drawing on feminist theories of voice, this introductory chapter considers how, historically, the idealised communicative mode for women has been silence. While women’s speech has often been violently punished with brutal methods such as the ducking stool and the scold’s bridle, in the contemporary context, it now seems that women are encouraged—even impelled—to speak out. However, the chapter cautions against a straightforward celebration of this apparent shift, arguing that there are new kinds of cruel punishments and costs associated with public speech. It proposes a feminist theory of communicative injustice, which relates to the insidious ways in which women, as well as LGBTQ people, people of colour, disabled people and other ‘others’ continue to be denied meaningful voice.
This chapter explores the thorny gender politics of anger in contemporary culture. While historically women have been denied rage as a political and communicative resource, in the #MeToo era it is often suggested that female anger is being ‘unleashed’, and therefore finally giving rise to meaningful voice. The chapter seeks to theorise a more ambivalent relationship between rage and communicative (in)justice, by putting critiques of #MeToo in dialogue with philosophies of anger and ressentiment. Criticisms of #MeToo point to the prevalence of personal narratives of anger directed at individual men—the ‘bad apple’ approach—which are seen to come at the expense of structural critique and collective rage. However, this chapter ultimately argues that seeking to banish or pathologise individual anger born from personal woundedness risks doing further symbolic harm to those who have been abused.
This chapter considers the history of the ‘nagging wife’ trope, and how this is insidiously mobilised to discredit women’s political speech. It analyses the 1973 television debate series No Man’s Land, paying particular attention to the ways that it was critically received and reviewed. It shows how the programme’s explicitly feminist politics was typically interpreted as an egregious affront to television’s gendered modes of address and that the talk of its feminist participants was understood as a form of televisual nagging. While much scholarship argues that television has democratised public speech because it tends to be friendly and non-didactic, this chapter argues that we must account for the gender politics of ‘friendliness’—and that women’s speech that is angry, complaining, ‘nagging’ or ‘rude’ should not be precluded from being considered ‘democratic’.
This chapter offers a feminist analysis of mediated political speech, focusing on the UK’s long-running debate programme Question Time. Women have long been positioned as ‘interlopers’ in mediated politics—they are systematically under-represented and rendered as communicatively ‘out of place’. However, it now appears that we are in a transformed context: Question Time has a female presenter and regularly achieves gender parity on its panel. Taking a more critical, intersectional feminist approach, the chapter argues that this ‘progress’ predominantly benefits white, middle-class, cisgendered women. It considers the experiences of the black British MP Diane Abbott on Question Time to argue that mediated politics is still characterised by communicative injustice. It also draws on insights from disability theory, arguing that multiple voices are excluded because of the implicit insistence that ‘democratic’ speech must be confident, fluent and ‘masterful’.
Mediatization became a central concept in media and communication studies in the early 2000s. Mediatization calls for a critical engagement with the changes invested in media and their role in high modern societies, and the effects of those changes. Such a process is understood to have profound gendered consequences. Particularly crucial are the reflections around the empowering/disempowering effects of the pervasive presence of media in our lives and, in particular, on their role in both reproducing and disrupting hegemonic understanding of gender and sexuality. This entry focuses especially on the mediatization of politics and its role in perpetuating discourses that tend to marginalize and minoritize those who do not conform to a deeply gendered and racialized ideal of power. It then examines how the emancipatory and transformative power of social media is deeply intertwined with practices that reproduce conservative gender politics.
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