Invisible Women? A Comparative Analysis of MP Visibility in Newspapers in Six European Countries

This article asks three questions: If, when and why do women in politics receive less media attention than their male colleagues? Media attention is an invaluable electoral asset and structurally less media coverage could help explain women’s underrepresentation. So far, gender differences in media visibility have mostly been studied in single country studies, which are overwhelmingly focused on the US. While the consensus rising from the US studies is that the disadvantage in visibility women has disappeared in past decades, most studies in Europe, Australia and Canada still find a gender gap in media attention. As we lack truly comparative studies (excepting two or three studies), we currently fail to understand why the gap is present in some contexts, but not in others. Moreover, many studies do not consider other factors that might influence the news value of a political actor or accessibility to journalists, such as political activity and prior political experience. This article remedies these two shortcomings by comparing men and women parliamentarians’ news visibility in six European countries while extensively controlling for a host of relevant variables, including prior political functions outside parliament, current list position and activity, and prior experience as an MP. To this end, we conducted a computer-assisted content analysis on two broadsheet dailies per country for over 3,000 MPs during one full legislative cycle. The results show that even after controlling extensively for individual differences and political experiences, women parliamentarians are less visible in the news than their male counterparts. However, the difference in media attention varies widely over countries, and strikingly not consistent with gender equality norms.