“I Can’t Just Pull a Woman Out of a Hat”: A Mixed-Methods Study on Journalistic Drivers of Women’s Representation in Political News

Abstract

While the persisting issue of women’s underrepresentation in political news partly arises from biases in the social reality, journalism plays a crucial role in mediating these biases. This study proposes a multilayered framework of gendered influences in journalistic news production to understand how journalistic factors exacerbate or mitigate women’s media representation. Drawing from a mixed-methods design (content analysis, survey, interviews), journalists’ own gender emerges as the strongest predictor of gendered representations. Women’s underrepresentation is also influenced by professional roles but not by organizations’ gender guidelines. We explore how journalists perceive these influences and discuss conceptual and practical implications.

Gender Imbalance in the Media: Time Lag or Hysteresis?—French Newspapers, Gender Parity Shocks, and the Long and Winding Road to the Demasculinization of Political Reporting (1990–2020)

“…Armstrong's study of US national and local newspapers shows that a female byline is a good predictor of the gender of the people mentioned (Armstrong, 2004). Leiva and Kimber study of Chilean press also confirmed an impact of the gender of reporters and editors on the contents (2022), as well as did Riedl et al (2022) for Austria. Other work has shown that women journalists also tend to represent a greater diversity of sources in their stories, in terms of gender and ethnicity, and they tend to write in a less stereotypical way (Rodgers and Thorson, 2003).…”

Are women journalists in leadership changing work conditions and newsroom culture?

“…Following this theoretical approach, women who are a marginalized and underrepresented group in journalism leadership and have dealt with the dominant group of men journalist leaders are potentially a starting point for better insights. Riedl et al (2022:16) found that the role of journalists’ gender is “crucial…for whether and to what extent women appear in political news, with a stronger tendency for men journalists to underrepresent women” (p. 16). Such insights have been tied to reevaluating what is considered knowledge (Harding, 2008), because identities are socially constructed and identity is also relevant to all knowledge-seeking projects, “especially those knowledges involved in cultural interpretation” (Alcoff, 2000: 243).…”