Women politicians in the UK press: not seen and not heard?

Abstract

This article asks questions about the ways in which female politicians are depicted in presscoverage. Previous research has explored the ways in which female politicians are constructed as 'other' from the male politician norm (Van Zoonen, 2006), where 'men were taken to stand for the whole human population ' (Gill, 2007: 9). Other work has shown that coverage emphasises their appearance (Garcia-Blanco and Wahl-Jorgensen, 2011) or femininity (Harmer and Wring, 2013 Ideally, a healthy democratic system should be representative of the society it serves: first, because of what that conveys and symbolizes to an electorate about citizenship and who is valued in society; second, so that issues pertinent to all members of society have a greater chance of being aired and addressed by our politicians; and, third, so that society will benefit from the widest possible range of skills and experience being utilised in the governance of the country.Arguably, in the wake of the expenses scandal and cynicism about our parliamentary representatives and the electoral system, in the UK the issue of parliamentary

Candidate Gender and the Media Attention in the 2015 UK General Election

“…While it is widely believed that the media cover female and male politicians differently with respect to tone and content (O'Neil et al 2016;Ross et al 2013;Aday and Devitt 2001), our findings here suggest that gender bias in coverage content is less prevalent in local media than in national media. But an important limitation of our study is that we do not consider many aspects of coverage content or quality, as our focus here has been on coverage quantity.…”

“…The relationship between the gender of politicians and the quantity of coverage they receive has been examined in a number of studies (Kahn and Goldenberg 1991;Heldman et al 2005;O'Neil et al 2016). The question is particularly important because low levels of media coverage may adversely affect voters' recognition of candidates (Goldenberg and Traugott 1984;Kahn 1992) and public recognition of candidates is associated with their electoral performance (Goldenberg and Traugott 1984;Kahn 1992, Lovenduski 1997.…”

Between Politics and Show Business: Public Discourse on Social Media Regarding Ksenia Sobchak, the Only Female Candidate in the 2018 Russian Presidential Election

“…Women often receive less coverage in the D. Yu. Kulchitskaya, A. O. Folts МЕДИАСОЦИОЛОГИЯ media than men [Gidengil, Everitt, 2003;Lawrence, Rose, 2009;Dunaway et al, 2013;O'Neill, Savigny, Cann, 2016]. Sometimes they are devalued and criticized by the public for presenting a different role model and not following the traditionalist perception that women should devote their lives to their family instead of participating in politics [Banwart, 2010].…”

A Matter of Public Interest: Press Coverage of the Outfits of Women MPs 1918–1930

“…As the numbers of women in Parliament have increased -still slowly, given the number of elections that have taken place in the century since 1918, but in greater numbers since the advent of techniques such as all-women shortlists -studies of the media coverage that they receive have continued to show that there is still a disproportionate interest in their appearance over their politics (O'Neill, Savigny and Cann, 2016). While modern MPs are more likely to challenge this directly, their challenges appear to have little impact -indeed, some commentators suggest that things are getting worse for women MPs in terms of their media coverage (Mavin, Bryans and Cunningham, 2010).…”