The Contradictions of Gendered Political Communication on Women’s Issues

Abstract

Despite making up a large percentage of the population, women are often overlooked on the global political stage, leading to insufficient action regarding so-called women’s issues. The visibility of women is important for the advancement of these issues, and while some contexts, such as political campaigns, offer encouraging trends, others, notably media coverage, leave a lot to be desired. This panel seeks to address these contexts aiming to understand their significance for the future of political communication. First, Caroline Leicht and Jessica Smith explore how the presence of women in party leadership roles and campaigns influences media issue coverage and how campaign contexts shape party political communication surrounding women’s issues across seven countries. Then, Merel Fieremans, Silvia Erzeel and Jonas Lefevere examine party communications during the 2019 Belgian Federal Elections to explore the extent to which parties adopt ambiguous positions on gender issues, what explains variations, and how this dynamic impacts democratic accountability. Next, Beth Dann investigates the visibility and framing of human rights abuses in the UK media during the 2022 FIFA World Cup. Using a mixed methods linguistic methodology, this study highlights the conditional nature of human rights reporting and reveals how traditional views and gendered bias towards women’s issues can allow for the continuation of abuse. Finally, Caroline Leicht examines how traditional broadcast news coverage compares to political comedy coverage of presidential elections. The study provides evidence of a decline in gendered biases in media coverage of women candidates, and shows that traditional and non-traditional media programs do not differ significantly on the issue of gendered media coverage. Overall, presentations on this panel will contribute to our understanding of how gendered media coverage differs across contexts and what implications this has.

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