Abstract
Despite progress towards female empowerment, women are underrepresented in politics. The media influences politics by acting as a gendered mediator and by conveying qualities perceived as appropriate for each gender. Additionally, female political representation in Africa is lower than in Europe (specifically Western Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa) and there is a difference in the media coverage that female politicians receive in these regions. Nonetheless, the Republic of South Africa (RSA) has a greater percentage of women in parliament than the United Kingdom (UK); however, the RSA is yet to have a female president while the UK has had two female heads of government in recent years. It is necessary to establish the way online news media outlets portray female politicians to determine the extent to which gender stereotyping exists in these country cases. Thus, this study aimed to explore how select online news media outlets portray female politicians, with the research question being: How have online news media outlets framed politicians, specifically Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma in the RSA and Theresa May in the UK, in terms of gender. Accordingly, the most popular online news media outlets were News24 and Timeslive in the RSA and BBC News Online and the Guardian Online in the UK. Google’s advanced search was used to retrieve archived articles from these online news media outlets. The time frame for article selection was 30 January 2017 to 20 December 2017 for Nkosazana Dlamini- Zuma, and 13 July 2016 to 13 July 2017 for Theresa May. The Framing Theory and the Gender Schema Theory were applied during article analysis, and content analysis and critical discourse analysis were used to investigate textual features in the articles. Overall, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma and Theresa May were portrayed in a non-gendered manner by the top online news media outlets of their nations. Nonetheless, some articles contained gendered content, and thus it was concluded that gender stereotyping of female politicians still exists in online news media. The significance of this study lies in the fact that despite progression towards gender equality, female politicians are still being perceived in a gendered manner, thereby diminishing their right to agency and individuality. Thus, the representation of female political candidates in the media needs to be revisited.
M.A. (Politics)