Political leadership has traditionally been associated with masculinity and men. However, there is growing evidence that gendered conceptions of leadership have evolved. While leadership remains masculinized, it has become increasingly inclusive of stereotypically feminine relational traits (Koenig et al., 2011). In addition, stereotypes of female politicians have shifted positively: they are now described as competent, moral, intelligent, and ambitious (van der Pas, Aaldering & Bos, 2023).
The gendered construction of political leadership is not only rooted in social norms but is also shaped by the media. The literature on the gendered mediation of political leadership draws directly on research about gender stereotypes and leadership traits but transposes its core questions from the level of voters to that of media discourse. Rather than asking how citizens perceive women and men as potential leaders, it investigates how the news media portray and evaluate the leadership of female and male politicians.
Very few studies in this field consider politicians’ ideological or partisan affiliation and how it may interact with their gender in shaping leadership coverage. While prior research has examined whether women and men politicians are described through similar or different leadership traits, and whether these traits are evaluated more positively or negatively, it has more rarely explored how such gendered portrayals might vary across the ideological spectrum (Hayes, 2011).
This article addresses how gender and ideology jointly shape the attribution and evaluation of leadership dimensions in media discourse during an electoral campaign. Building on Aaldering and Vliegenthart’s (2016) six-dimensional framework of political leadership, this study investigates both which dimensions are used to describe politicians and how these dimensions are evaluated in terms of tone.
The analysis draws on an original dataset of 1,789 leadership mentions extracted from 3,040 press articles covering the first round of the 2022 French presidential campaign. This election provides a unique opportunity to examine the articulation of gender and ideological profiles – including a prominent far-right female leader competing with a newly emerged far-right male contender, alongside female candidates representing the two traditional mainstream parties.
