Chapter 6. The media world versus the real world of women and political representation : Questioning differences and struggling for answers

The chapter "The mediaworld versus the real world of women and political representation: Questioning differences and struggling for answers", by Karen Ross, Marloes Jansen and Tobias Bürger, addresses the long-standing question of women’s voice in political news. The authors test the relationship of women, politics, and news with the incidence of women politicians as elected representatives, in two ways: first, by considering the extent to which women politicians are visible across the broad news landscape and second, by considering their visibility in news stories which are explicitly political in orientation. What the authors find is a global and systematic pattern of underrepresentation of women politicians in the news compared with their actual numbers in legislatures across the world. Their analysis suggests that the “real” world of politics seems to be more gender-equal than the media world of mainstream news. The chapter goes on to consider possible reasons to explain this difference, including the role played by socio-cultural factors such as a nation’s broad equality commitment and the extent to which the gender balance in newsrooms, including in senior editorial positions, has an impact on the visibility of women politicians in news content. The project Comparing Gender and Media Equality across the Globe has been fundedby the Swedish Research Council (2016–2020) and is based at the Department of Journalism, Media and Communication (JMG) at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.The GEM dataset and its codebook are free to use and can be downloaded in variousformats. For access, contact JMG. Please ensure that proper attribution is given when citing the dataset.