1. The Politician, the Wife, the
Citizen and her Newspaper
article by Charlotte Adcock
A presentation by Richard Lawler and Liam Long

2. Progress in Parliament?
 1997 elections – more women elected to parliament
than ever before
 120 women = 18%
 “Gendered politics” prevented women from self-
representing
 Stereotypes of “womanhood” underpinned media
coverage
 Progress needs to improve women’s presence as
participants in mediated political discourse, not just as
examples
 Female politicians are more likely to be gendered or
sexualised in the media than their male colleagues
 The media is complicit in the ongoing sexism of British
politics

3. Politics, Parliament and the
Press Society is complacent about women’s position in
parliament
 There is ambiguity as to why parliament might
need more women
 Current discourse focuses on barriers that obstruct
women’s access to political participation
 The media’s role in democracy is widely debated,
but we should seek to put a more gender sensitive
lens on the debate in order to highlight endemic
gender related issues for both politics and the
media
 In depth analysis of a particular election’s media
coverage of women can help to map and analyse
women’s representation

4. The Research
• Structural marginalisation of women
• Women were not “newsworthy”
• Different papers took different attitudes towards women, but
all of the major papers under represented and marginalised
women

5. “You can judge a man by his
wife”
 A second “type” of women who featured prominently in the
1997 election’s media coverage
 Cherie Blair and Norma Major presented by the papers as
secondary figures, loyally accompanying their husbands
 Blair especially was used by the papers, both in support of
her husband and to his detriment, but was never discussed in
her own right

6. Conclusions
 Representation of women in this election
varied significantly across different titles
 Few women featured in ways that did not
conform to sexualised patterns of media
coverage
 Current media practices present a large
challenge to progress for women in
political representation
 The burden for alleviating this problem
currently lies with female journalists, but
should be transferred to the wider
industry if progress is to be made