Over thirty-five years have passed since CEDAW called for gender equality in political leadership. Since then, scholars have documented the increase in female members of parliament (FMPs) worldwide, but has getting closer to a potential ‘critical mass’ resulted in any significant changes in the way global mass media outlets depict FMPs in the shaping of public discourse and perceptions? Addressing the literature on media representation of FMPs which typically focuses on a single country or small numbers of countries, we introduce a new dataset on global print media coverage of women in parliament drawn from 265 newspapers in 48 countries over a thirty-five year period from 1980 to 2014. Applying systematic qualitative and quantitative content analysis from the perspective of symbolic representation, we observe both promising developments as well as a number of disturbing trends in worldwide media portrayals of FMPs.
