Gender Mediation, Character, and Competence: Comparing News Coverage of Heads of Government in the Canadian Provinces

Female politicians operate in a gendered media environment. Though explicit gendering of women in politics – through a focus on their appearance or private lives – is now typically seen as inappropriate, it is possible that seemingly gender-neutral news coverage can emphasize a politician’s gender. This is problematic, as such gendered coverage can cue that women in politics remain abnormal compared to a prototypical male politician. Given this, this paper makes two key contributions to the literature on gender and political news. First, we develop new dictionaries to capture politicians’ character, competence, and the competitive context in which they operate. From this, we use an automated, dictionary-based content analysis tool, Lexicoder, to assess if news coverage of female politicians on these three ostensibly gender-neutral areas systematically differs from that of their male peers. Second, instead of focusing on candidates for public office, as much of the literature does, we take advantage of a wave of female provincial premiers that emerged in Canadian provinces after 2010. Using a matched comparison of three male and three female provincial premiers in three Canadian provinces from 2010 to 2015, we examine all media coverage in two national newspapers and each provincial flagship paper for the first year of office. In doing so, we provide a comprehensive view of the ways in which seemingly neutral coverage of character, competence, and competition differs for female and male heads of government.