The Political Glass Ceiling: How Media Bias Impacts the Rise of Female Candidates to Executive Office

Open Access
- Author:
- Zanowic, Casey
- Area of Honors:
- Political Science
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Erin Allyson Heidt-Forsythe, Thesis Supervisor
Sona N. Golder, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- media
content analysis
media coverage
gender and politics
female politicians
executive elections - Abstract:
- Previous scholarship regarding gender, media, and politics have proven that women face many barriers in the American political system. Whether it is voter stereotypes, stigma, or underrepresentation, it is well established that women candidates face biases when running for political office. When you add in the media, women face even more potential biases. Recent research has indicated that the media portrays women running for office differently than they do men; however, little research has been conducted on the role that the media plays in executive elections, and specifically the impact that this gendered coverage has on women presidential candidates and men presidential candidates from the same party. The goal of this study is to determine how the media portrays political candidates using gendered frames and the impact that this gendered media coverage has on women political candidates for president. Using previous measures of media biases (e.g., decreased quantity of coverage; increased negativity; emphasis on appearance, family, and marital status; and lack of focus on policy positions), I conduct a content analysis of 104 articles from The New York Times and its coverage of four men and four women candidates from the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries. The time frame I examine is from April 25, 2019 to December 3, 2019, which is the time period between when the last of my eight candidates joined the race to when the first of my eight candidates dropped out of the race. When analyzing these articles, I code for previously used measures of media biases to suggest that presidential candidates who are women still face gendered media frames and biases that disadvantage them. Results show that there are still biases present in media coverage of men and women running for president. Women candidates receive less coverage overall, and when they are covered by the media they are portrayed more negatively. The press is focused more on their appearance and personal lives than their policy positions.