How the News Media Cover Women in Politics: 5 Recent Studies to Know
Originally published by Clark Merrefield for Editor & Publisher
In the mid-1990s, Arizona State University political scientist Kim Fridkin dubbed U.S. press coverage of male and female candidates vying for state office a “distorted mirror” marked by gender bias that failed to accurately reflect the political landscape.
“In senatorial races, women receive less campaign coverage than their male counterparts and the coverage they receive is more negative — emphasizing their unlikely chances of victory,” Fridkin wrote in 1994 in The Journal of Politics, based on her analysis of news stories about 47 statewide campaigns from 1982 to 1988. “In both senatorial and gubernatorial races, women receive consistently less issue attention than their male counterparts.”
When the paper was published, 6% of U.S. senators were women, while women made up about 11% of members of Congress, according to a 2023 report on women leaders in U.S. politics by the Pew Research Center. About 21% of state legislators were women in the mid-1990s, as were 6% of governors, according to the Pew report.
By 2023, 25% of U.S. senators, 29% of Congress, 33% of state legislators and 24% of governors were women.
As women have occupied more positions of political power, so has news framing and language used in media coverage become more scrutinized.
How researchers explore gender bias in political news coverage
In the last few years, academic researchers have used a variety of technology, including text processing and image recognition software, to assess potential gender bias in media coverage. They have analyzed potential bias such as an outsized focus on female politicians’ looks, displays of emotion, and the overall amount of coverage they receive relative to their male counterparts.
Hillary Clinton has been among the most covered female politicians in the news in recent decades — and media scholars have dissected much of that coverage.
In 2008, for example, Clinton ran against Barack Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination. Obama had won Iowa, and the race was tight in the next state to vote, New Hampshire. At a campaign stop in early January that year, an apparent supporter asked Clinton, “How do you do it? How do you keep upbeat, and so wonderful?”
It was an intimate room, with Clinton seated at a table with about a dozen other people and roughly the same number of news cameras surrounding them. Clinton answered the question over the next two minutes, speaking quietly at times and welling up at others. The next day, New Hampshire voters chose Clinton by less than 3 percentage points.
In examining 37 transcripts of major national newscasts from Jan. 7 to 9, 2008, the authors of a 2014 peer-reviewed paper find 21 of the news reports framed Clinton’s response as strategic, questioning whether it was genuine. An anchor on ABC noted that the “emotional moment” came just as political analysts were suggesting she needed to be “more human.” Several reports referred to the event as “humanizing” and suggested it had affected the outcome of the election.
“[W]ithin three days, Clinton was framed as a winner and loser, a broken-down ice queen and victorious strategist, someone who was unfeminine and yet could only appeal to women,” write communication scholars Rebecca Curnalia and Dorian Mermer in the 2014 paper. “She had set back feminism and inspired women.”
Also in 2008, television and print media covered a bevy of factors relating to Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, including her voice, looks and sex appeal, which had little-to-no bearing on policy.
In 2013, Texas State Sen. Wendy Davis filibustered on the floor of that state’s legislature for 11 hours, in order to block a bill that would have restricted abortion access. Much of the subsequent coverage of the filibuster focused on what Davis wore — pink shoes — rather than the substance of the legislation or Davis’ opposition to it, research has found.
In analyzing 117 news stories from local and national newspapers in the week around the filibuster, the authors of an April 2016 peer-reviewed paper found those outlets devoted disproportionate space to Davis’ personal life and sartorial choices.
“Rather than debating about women’s issues and reproductive rights, or the arguments used to both support and oppose the bill, or even the testimonies that Davis mentioned during her filibuster, the attention was mostly on the theatrical aspects of the event, with the Texas capitol becoming a stage and Wendy Davis, the single-mother-at-19, pink-shoes-wearing performer as the main act,” write communication and journalism professors Dustin Harp, Jaime Loke and Ingrid Bachmann.
In 2016, Clinton, this time as the Democratic Party nominee for president, cable news pundits repeatedly went on air advising her to “smile.” In late 2018, Democratic Party presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren was met with questions from the media about her “likeability” less than a day after she announced her candidacy.
The “likability trap,” as it’s known, refers to women in positions of power having to be both highly qualified and broadly likable to colleagues and clients in the corporate world, and to voters in the political realm. It’s similar in concept to the “gender double bind,” in which women in leadership positions are expected to be both competent and warm, according to research out of the University of Michigan.
To be fair, some news outlets have devoted space to covering likability questions surrounding male politicians, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. The issue also came up in the 2012 presidential race, with Republican nominee Mitt Romney facing a “deep likability gap” against Obama.
Likability is important to both men and women voters, according to a 2016 research memo from the Barbara Lee Family Foundation, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization that aims to increase the number of women holding public office. It’s one of few studies in the past decade, academic or otherwise, to analyze the likability trap. The researchers conducted seven focus groups with voters from a range of demographic backgrounds, along with a survey of 1,000 likely voters.
“Likeability seems like a quality that would be desirable in any candidate or officeholder — male or female,” the authors write. “And it is. But it is more important for women.”