How Are Women Politicians Treated in the Press? The Case of Spain, France and the United Kingdom

Abstract

Women politicians have been discriminated against or negatively valued under stereotypes in media coverage and have been given a secondary role compared to male politicians. The article proposes an analysis of the treatment given by digital media to women political leaders. They are from different parties in three countries and the aim is to identify the polarity (positive, neutral or negative) of the information published about them in the media. The text focuses on the cases of Anne Hidalgo and Marine Le Pen, from France, Nicola Sturgeon and Theresa May, from the United Kingdom and Ada Colau and Inés Arrimadas, from Spain. The study develops a computerised sentiment analysis of the information published in two leading digital newspapers in each country, during the month of November 2019. The research, with the analysis of 1100 journalistic pieces, shows that the polarity or valence of the women analysed is predominantly neutral and positive and that the journalistic genres do not determine the media representation of the women studied. On the contrary, the country of study does have a predominant incidence on the way in which women politicians are represented, while the relationship of affinity or antipathy of the Spanish media with the women politicians studied is significant.

Foreign and Domestic Online Media Representation of Indonesian Minister of Finance: A Feminist Stylistics Approach

“…The online platform gives newspapers more opportunities, such as competing with broadcast journalism to deliver breaking news faster. Suárez Romero suggests that "female under-representation is embodied in a triple dimension: that of the media, that of public opinion, and that of politics itself" (Fernández-Rovira & Giraldo-Luque, 2021). The majority of studies on female politicians' representation in news media believe that the problem is twofold: one is women's news media marginalization in relation to their actual presence as political actors on the national and international stage, and the other is how they are reported when they do receive airtime and column inches (Ross et al, 2020).…”