Sexism on display: The image of women politicians through the prism of journalistic discourse

Abstract

From 1960s onwards sexist language intended to denigrate, objectify and trivialize women has been seriously exposed internationally and huge efforts were made to replace it with gender-neutral language. However, to date, sexism has not been fully suppressed and it is especially conspicuous in relation to women who assume active roles in public life. This study has both qualitative and quantitative design and looks into the presence of overt and implicit sexism (as categorized by Mills, 2008) in journalistic discourse and the role of sexist language in molding the image of modern day women politicians. For the purposes of this study, we conduct a critical discourse analysis of a corpus of 40 news articles published on various online news portals and electronic platforms of traditional media. All analyzed articles comment on the political statements and actions of two Macedonian female politicians currently in office – the Minister of Defense and the Mayor of the city of Skopje. The findings suggest that Macedonian journalistic discourse, under the pretext that politicians’ dealings need to be monitored closely, scrutinized and even criticized, still leaves the door slightly open for both overt and implicit sexist linguistic forms, which, in turn, depicts female politicians as ill-suited for this type of professional occupation.