Women and the Public Sphere in GCC States: A Study of Media Attention and Attitudes Towards Women Empowerment (2000-2017)

While the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, have increased their promotion of women in public life over the last decades, official statistics, such as the Global Gender Gap report (2017), still indicate severe differences in equality between men and women in these societies. Focusing on the public sphere, this paper studies the development of public attention and attitudes towards the state-centered approaches of women empowerment in GCC states (2000-2017). In particular, it seeks to analyze in what arenas of society (e.g., politics, the economy, civil society) topics of women empowerment are most often addressed, as well as in what fashion they are addressed (e.g. in support, rejection or neutrality), and finally how did this potentially change over time. Empirically, the paper is based on a quantitative content analysis of newspaper headlines of 12 newspapers from the six GCC states.