The never-ending challenge of understanding how media discourse portrays women in politics

Abstract

In the last decades, women have entered the public arena, particularly institutional politics, as appointed officials and elected representatives, at both national and local levels. It has been a long way from the movements pushing for guaranteeing women the right to vote and to get educated since the late nineteenth century. A wide range of feminist agendas and movements globally has contributed to widening human rights for girls and women, including the access to education, to vote, and to participate as candidates in elections. There are places, however, where such basic rights are still under attack and women have been struggling to make their way into schools, local and national political organizations, and even to have their own voice. The protests of women in Iran in 2022, the shrinking of rights for girls and women in Afghanistan, the lack of autonomy for women in many societies around the world demonstrate that it is still fundamental to expose discrimination against women and improve their status everywhere. Cultural issues are key to better understanding the scope and nature of status of women in different societies. Indeed, the uneven field for many of them depends on a set of key dimensions, such as class, race, ethnicity, and age, to mention a few. In other words, the visibility and the features framing women in the public sphere are heavily situated. Consequently, the experience of entering the political arena is not the same for a white, well-educated, and upper-class women in an industrialized country than for a non-white, with an indigenous background, and a trajectory of grassroots activism located in an underdeveloped country, for instance. The way as the society as a whole, the costumes, the media, the State, and even other women signify the role of female politicians varies from country to country. It even varies from national to local level. Media, at large, is a field of cultural struggle for what is worthy to represent and how must be portrayed. It has been particularly aggressive for female politicians along history. The role of media in enhancing (or shrinking) women’s rights has been at the center of intellectual concern of feminist activism and research. By the late 1970s, Gaye Tuchman (1978) raised questions that still resonate in this matter: