Disappearing Women? The Threshold Effect on Media Reporting of Candidates and Athletes

A gendered media system may not be willing or able to keep up with the greater numbers of women in public life. Implicit gender bias may become more powerful as the involvement of women in public life surges. With few women journalists can consciously correct for implicit bias. With many women it is too cognitively demanding to do so. We show this happened after the doubling of female general election candidates in Ireland in 2016 and after the doubling of female Olympic athletes in Ireland in 2012. We study twenty five million words of media content over fourteen Irish general election campaigns and four thousand articles over three Summer Olympic Games. We recommend that media organisations introduce explicit procedures to correct for implicit bias. This is especially important in advance of the introduction of gender quotas or other expected increases in female participation in public life.