A Tale of Two Women: A Comparative Media Analysis of UK Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May

Women in politics have long experienced misogynistic media representations throughout their terms. Furthermore, evidence suggests the more authoritative the position a woman occupies, the more denigration she receives. Hence we can expect that women political leaders will endure more negative and often gendered media representation. This was the case for the United Kingdom’s first woman Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and it appears to be the same for the current UK Prime Minister, Theresa May. This paper will compare the ways the media represented each of these women for the first three weeks of their prime ministerial term. The aim is to discover if the media representation of women Prime Ministers has changed and, if so, has it changed for the better? Comparisons will also be made to see if newspapers from the ‘left’ and the ‘right’ differ in their treatment of these two Prime Ministers. To do this, I will focus on four prominent newspapers, two of which are broadsheets (The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph) and the other two are tabloids (The Mirror and The Sun). The paper will be based on content and discourse analysis of articles mentioning Thatcher and May during each time period (May 1979 and July/August 2016), to unpack the gendered ways in which the media represent these women. Currently, little has been written on the media comparison between Thatcher and May and this paper will address this gap.