Engender blog
GUEST POST: “Warning” versus “claiming”: the subtle misogyny in media discourse
Today we're publishing the next in a series of blogs from the current student placements Engender is hosting from the University of Strathclyde Applied Gender Studies and Research Methods course.
Kirsty Rorrison's final post continues research into gender bias in political news reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, she discusses how male and female politicians are quoted and referenced in the media, and how this language plays into wider patriarchal society. You can read Kirsty's first post here and the second post here.
For my third and final blog post, I want to discuss what my research found about female politicians and their news coverage relating to the pandemic. In my last post, I discussed my findings on journalism and COVID-19 in a more general sense; I showed that the topics reported on and who was writing about them seemed heavily linked with patriarchal gender norms. Now, I want to consider what I learned about women in politics based on their representations in news coverage of the pandemic.
Firstly, I found that male politicians received more mentions than women, and the same men were referenced multiple times. Women received fewer mentions overall and were less likely to be mentioned repeatedly. While I was conducting my research, I realised that it wasn’t sufficient only to employ a quantitative analysis of politicians mentioned according to gender, race, and so on; while this data was certainly helpful, it failed to capture the subtleties and nuance I noticed in the news coverage I was analysing. On the advice of my supervisors, I began to think about the ways in which politicians were being represented when they did appear in the news. Were they quoted directly, indirectly, or not at all? What terminology was used to describe them and their ideas? Just because a politician was mentioned does not mean that they have been mentioned the same way as others.
After consulting Carmen Coulthard’s work on direct and indirect quotations, I realised that men tended to be directly quoted - often extensively. On the other hand, women were directly quoted much less and tended to have their thoughts summarised and shortened by the journalist. For example, I only recorded two instances of First Minister Nicola Sturgeon being directly quoted, while male politicians were consistently given direct quotations. Coulthard argues that we can understand this trend through feminist theory - men’s voices are prioritised, and their opinions are granted respect and trust, and as such, they do not have their ideas rephrased or condensed. On the other hand, women rarely get to express their opinions directly and fully since their authority is not often accepted, and subconsciously it is believed that their ideas can be adequately communicated by others.
In terms of the words used when politicians were mentioned, I found that women were described via less definite terminology than men in politics. For instance, most of the time, men were “saying,” “asserting,” “warning,” and so on. Women, on the other hand, often “claimed,” “suggested,” or “argued.” When I first identified this difference, I didn’t think it was particularly noteworthy. However, as I furthered my reading list, I began to understand the nuances present in this difference. When women are described this way, they are subtly undermined and questioned; a term like “claim” does not indicate certainty but rather a degree of scepticism about what is being said.
On the other hand, language like “warning” suggests a level of trust in the speaker’s authority. When this is considered in the context of our patriarchal society, it becomes clear that gender accounts for these different portrayals of politicians. Women are described using more uncertain language because they are viewed as less competent and less authoritative as a result of their gender; the fact that I recorded these instances multiple times shows that it was a definite pattern rather than an isolated incident. Inversely, men are granted trust and authority to know because they are men - by virtue of their gender and its position within the patriarchy, they are seen to be knowledgeable in whatever they discuss.
With this blog post, I conclude my placement with Engender. It has been a privilege to work with each of my talented and knowledgeable supervisors, and I’ve gained so much from this experience. My research has shown that Scottish news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic is clearly gendered - this relates to what is written about, who is writing about it, and who is mentioned in news stories. In terms of politicians, I have found that men are mentioned more overall and that people of colour in politics are notably underrepresented. I have also seen that the ways in which male and female politicians appear in news coverage are different; while men tend to be directly quoted, women are often indirectly quoted. There were also differences in the language used when men and women in politics were mentioned; while men “warned,” “stated,” or “said” things, women “claimed” and “suggested.”
Overall, gender plays an undeniable part in the ways female politicians are represented (or not represented) in Scottish news coverage of the pandemic, but in order to understand the extent of this difference, I needed to delve deeper than a simple quantitative analysis of appearances. Further work must be done to explore these findings further, and in the future, an intersectional analysis should be employed to account for factors like race and sexuality.
GUEST POST: Who says what? A breakdown of gender bias in news topics and reporting
Today we're publishing the next in a series of blogs from the current student placements Engender is hosting from the University of Strathclyde Applied Gender Studies and Research Methods course.
In the second of three posts, Kirsty Rorrison continues research into gender bias in political news reporting during the COVID-19 pandemic. Here, she looks specifically at the breakdown of bias in topics and authors, as well as whose voices are missing in the reporting of the pandemic. You can read Kirsty's first post here.
As my placement with Engender is nearing its end, I have finally completed my research on gender, COVID-19 and media. In this blog post, I’m going to discuss what I found out in my investigation and why it was crucial that I delved a bit deeper into this topic. As I mentioned in my previous post, my main area of interest in this research has always been the ways in which women in politics are represented. However, I also wanted to look at how other women, and more broadly gender, appeared in news coverage of coronavirus. For this research, I ended up coding 108 news stories. I took note of the topic, the gender of the journalist, and the identity markers of every person mentioned in each article. I wanted to see where gender appeared in news coverage, whether this related to the kinds of topics being discussed, the journalists who wrote about them or the people mentioned in articles. In this blog post, I will outline what my analysis revealed about journalists and news topics - in other words, who is writing, and what are they writing about?
[Figure 1]
I was surprised to find a fairly even split between male and female journalists in my sample [Figure 1]; in fact, women were actually writing about COVID-19 more than men. At first glance, I thought this might suggest that journalism has become more equal in terms of gender. However, upon closer inspection, I realised that things weren’t as progressive as they seemed. While men and women were both reporting on the COVID-19 pandemic, the topics assigned to journalists varied significantly with gender. I found that women were far more likely to cover stories on public health and the NHS than their male counterparts, whereas reporting of politics and economics was often carried out by men. This is consistent with previous work on women in journalism - ‘hard’ news stories relating to industry and politics tend to be given to men, while women are relegated to covering so-called ‘softer’ topics like health, social care and education. This is not true in every case, and I did record instances of women writing about politics and business. However, the general trends I observed speak to wider patriarchal norms in our society, wherein men are respected for technical expertise and intelligence, and women are valued in the realms of emotion, care and nurturing. A breakdown of the article topic by gender of the journalist is shown below [Figure 2].
[Figure 2]
I’d spent quite a while exploring what journalists had been reporting on when I suddenly thought to myself, “what about the topics which aren’t being written about?”. I’d combed through 121 news stories over a seven day period, but I hadn’t encountered anything about domestic violence or caring responsibilities. While these topics hadn’t come up, I’d read multiple articles about planning holidays around travel restrictions. It’s a well-known fact that domestic violence, for instance,
GUEST POST: Precedented inequalities in unprecedented times
![Bright pink graphic that reads: "Stereotypical gender roles and wider social structures inform the ways in which they [women] are represented, scrutinised, and even obscured - this can be even more complicated for women who experience oppressions due to their race, sexuality, or other identities."](siteimages/Blog/resized/student-blog-kirsty-2022-1080x1080-400.png)
Here we've published the next in a series of blogs from the current student placements Engender is hosting from the University of Strathclyde Applied Gender Studies and Research Methods course.
In this post, Kirsty Rorrison discusses the COVID-19 pandemic, from it's impact on women and minoritised communities to it's representation in the media, and introduces research specifically focusing on how gender bias in political news reporting has operated during the pandemic. You can read Kirsty's second post here.
With the COVID-19 pandemic recently passing its two year anniversary, I’m sure many of us have been reflecting on the ways in which life has changed since the coronavirus first became a mainstream issue. We have all been impacted by the pandemic in one way or another - circumstances have changed personally, socially, politically and economically all across the world. However, while it may seem like everything in our society has fundamentally shifted, its underlying social structures have remained practically untouched. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic can be seen as something of a magnifying glass for the oppressive social institutions forming the bedrock of modern society. In these "unprecedented times,” some things have reflected the precedent more than ever.
As a poem written at the height of the pandemic says, “we are in the same storm, but not in the same boat.” Far from being an equaliser, COVID-19 has instead emphasised the multitude of divisions within our society. For instance, those within ethnic minority groups were met with a much higher risk of infection and death from the virus than their white counterparts. Racism against people of East and Southeast Asian descent became particularly prominent in response to the hypothesised origins of the novel virus. Women have faced unique challenges balancing increased caring responsibilities with the rest of their lives, and were also put at risk by skyrocketing rates of domestic abuse during the pandemic. Low income children often struggled to access online learning, while wealthier pupils made the transition to remote education relatively easily. While we have all been living through a public health crisis, our situations have been very different; hardship has been discriminatory and disproportionate, often impacting those who were already struggling before COVID-19. The pandemic has been front page news for over two years now, and in a time where the public has relied so heavily on news reporting, and so much has been written about the pandemic, the oppressive structures which have compounded the hardships of COVID-19 were bound to be reflected in news coverage itself.
As a placement student with Engender, I have been given the opportunity to investigate the gendered dimensions of the pandemic, specifically in relation to its coverage in the media. COVID-19 has dominated the news cycle for the past two years, and this massive quantity of reporting offers extremely valuable insights into what life has been like during the pandemic. Work has already been undertaken which exposes biases in news coverage; for instance, it has been shown that reporting on the pandemic tends to over-represent the voices and interests of people who are white, middle class, and often male. I have been carrying out a content analysis on COVID-19 news coverage from some of Scotland’s most popular newspapers, hoping to understand how gender is manifested in reporting on the coronavirus. While I expect to encounter a huge amount of data regarding gender, media and COVID-19, I intend to primarily focus on the ways in which representations of politicians in the news have been gendered.
In these times of uncertainty, nations have turned to their political leaders for information, guidance and even comfort - news coverage reflects this increase in public attention received by politicians. Women in politics have always faced gender bias in media. Stereotypical gender roles and wider social structures inform the ways in which they are represented, scrutinised, and even obscured - this can be even more complicated for women who experience oppressions due to their race, sexuality, or other identities. Men and women in politics experience very different news reporting; this is especially obvious when their news coverage directly compared.
For my research project, I am exploring the following research questions:
- Are women in politics represented differently than men in politics in news reporting of the COVID-19 pandemic?
- If they are, how can this difference be contextualised in wider social structures?
It has already been established that the pandemic has amplified existing inequalities in Scotland. It has also been proven that women in politics faced gender bias in news coverage prior to the pandemic. I am hoping to find the convergence in these two facts by investigating how gender bias in political news reporting has functioned during the COVID-19 pandemic. In other words, I will be considering how the precedent of gender bias in political news reporting has persisted despite these unprecedented times. My next two blog posts will detail my findings and consider the implications of the data this project produces. For now, I ask what the magnifying glass of COVID-19 may reveal about politics, gender and media.
BAFTAs so...diverse?
Awards season is upon us: the 2022 ceremony for the British Film and Television Awards (the BAFTAs) took place on the 13th of March, and the Academy Awards are coming up fast. As always, with awards-fever comes discussions of representation, and in this blog, Dr Miranda Barty-Taylor reflects on the changes we have seen to the BAFTA awards, and whether they are enough to bring about women's equality in the arts.
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When they are done right, or even when they are done wrong, awards ceremonies can highlight the work of women and other underrepresented people within the film and TV industry. They can increase the visibility of participation on screen and off, create role models, shift stereotypes and increase the popularity – and economic viability - of hiring diverse actors and producers. But beneath the veneer and rhetoric of equality, has there been any real progress, or do prestigious awards remain as exclusive as ever? In this blog I’m going to be focusing on how far the BAFTAs have succeeded in using process-driven changes in their regulations to affect diversity of representation in the awards themselves.
In January 2020, strong criticism was levelled at BAFTA following the release of their nominee lists. From an equality and diversity perspective, the lack of progress was stark; the nominees for the performer categories (best lead and best supporting) were all white, and for the 7th year in a row the nominees for best director were all men. The hashtag #BaftasSoWhite trended and a spotlight was again shone on systemic racism and more general exclusion from awards ceremonies. Discussion ensued around specific exclusionary practices in the nominations and longlisting processes: those categories awarded by jury decisions for example, are notably more diverse than those decided by voting alone.
When Words Fail: The Way Institutions Talk about Sarah Everard Matters
[CN: violence against women, police violence]
In this blog post, Gender Equal Media Scotland's Development Officer, Dr. Miranda Barty-Taylor, discusses the language used by institutions in the wake of the Sarah Everard case and trial, and the epidemic of violence against women and girls in the UK. This blog entry largely refers to UK institutions.
I am grappling with my unproductivity, as my concentration veers from a report on gender equality in the media to the horrifying details emerging from the trial of Sarah Everard’s killer. I suppose it is little wonder; while half my brain analyses the discourses being reproduced in the inevitable public discussion of the trial, the other half is reeling from the fear she must have felt. Just as I deconstruct the ideologies behind the Met’s next statement, I feel again an incandescence of anger that is too bright to bear. The language coming from sites of political and police power is so very problematic, reinforcing misogynistic norms and neglecting to acknowledge the crisis of men’s violence against women.
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Engender Briefing: Pension Credit Entitlement Changes
From 15 May 2019, new changes will be introduced which will require couples where one partner has reached state pension age and one has not (‘mixed age couples’) to claim universal credit (UC) instead of Pension Credit.
Engender Parliamentary Briefing: Condemnation of Misogyny, Racism, Harassment and Sexism
Engender welcomes this Scottish Parliament Debate on Condemnation of Misogyny, Racism, Harassment and Sexism and the opportunity to raise awareness of the ways in which women in Scotland’s inequality contributes to gender-based violence.
Gender Matters in Social Security: Individual Payments of Universal Credit
A paper calling on the Scottish Government to automatically split payments of Universal Credit between couples, once this power is devolved to the Scottish Parliament.
Gender Matters Manifesto: Twenty for 2016
This manifesto sets out measures that, with political will, can be taken over the next parliamentary term in pursuit of these goals.
Scottish NGO Briefing for UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women
Joint briefing paper for the UN Rapporteur on Violence Against Women.
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