Gender and the Media Evaluation of Political Leadership : The Impact of Campaign Events

The media representation of women politicians has been a central focus of gender and politics scholarship over the past decades. Studies on gendered mediation have demonstrated that women face biases in both the quantity and content of their media coverage. However, the extent and nature of these biases are influenced by contextual factors such as the political system and the characteristics of media organizations (Van der Pas & Aaldering, 2020). To address the limited integration of gender and media perspectives in analyses of political leadership, some scholars have examined how leadership traits or capacities are represented in gendered terms within media coverage. Historically, media narratives have emphasized stereotypically masculine leadership qualities, such as assertiveness and strength, but recent studies in Belgium and Canada indicate a growing appreciation for stereotypically feminine leadership attributes, including empathy and collaboration (Deswert, 2021; Trimble et al., 2022; Wagner et al., 2022). Gender differences in media coverage extend to the unequal evaluation of politicians’ leadership traits, with women often receiving more negative assessments of their communication skills, intellectual substance, and political experience, particularly for women who occupy "exceptional" positions, such as being the first woman to lead their political party (Wagner et al., 2019). Emerging research has explored the role of contextual factors – such as the political system or the temporal context (e.g., election campaigns versus routine governance periods) – in shaping gendered discourses on political leadership in the media (Trimble, 2017; Aaldering & Van der Pas, 2020). This paper intends to contribute to this contextual approach by assuming that during electoral campaigns, the gendered construction of political leadership in media discourse is shaped by campaign events. Indeed, the media do not just mention political candidates and leaders, but they tell a story of these personalities taking actions, reacting to or participating in political events. The paper argues that campaign events can be interpreted through a gendered lens, potentially affecting how candidates are evaluated in media coverage. For instance, women’s political leadership may be judged more harshly in the context of stereotypically masculine events, such as political rallies. Employing a dictionary-based approach and quantitative textual analysis using the Quanteda R package, this paper investigates the impact of campaign events on the gendered mediation of political leadership during the 2022 French presidential elections. The analysis is based on a corpus of over 2,000 news articles published during the campaign.