Gender Stereotypes in the Portrayal of Female Politicians in American Online Newspapers

Abstract

This study aims to examine the presence of gender stereotypes towards female politicians in American online newspapers. The focus is on gender stereotypes expressed through language use. The method used to investigate this phenomenon is a content analysis of 90 articles from three newspapers, namely The Washington Post, The New York Times and The Guardian US, posted from January 2019 to August 2020, towards three American politicians, namely: Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The results have shown that women in politics are portrayed with a strong stereotypical language as the three newspapers contained a substantial body of gender stereotypes towards them. Moreover, the results have revealed that females in politics are mainly depicted through descriptive words related to their personal lives, such as marital status, appearance, and family, rather than other career-related information which could be relevant to the context of the articles. As such, this research could easily find an application in many fields, including media studies, sociolinguistics, cultural studies, politics studies, and gender studies. Nevertheless, a larger scale study and further research on American newspapers and the inclusion of more female politicians is needed, in order to confirm that female politicians are portrayed stereotypically by media.