Introduction
Gina Miller was the businesswoman who forced the UK government to seek a vote from the Houses of Parliament before invoking âArticle 50â to take the country out of the European Union (âBrexitâ). After the extraordinary win of this British citizen against the might of government, Miller endured much censure in national newspapers and elsewhere. She said of this:
Everything about you is criticised, and itâs simply not the same for men. Thatâs why we have such a huge problem with [the representation of] women in the media. Why would you put yourself up in that situation to be targeted so ruthlessly?
(Gina Miller quoted in The Guardian, Addley 2017)
Despite significant career progress by women leaders in the professions, many British national newspapers continue to construct senior women in gendered, stereotyped and/or essentialised ways. These media representations are potentially damaging to both aspiring and established women leaders because they send out messages that women are unsuitable for leadership in a predominantly male professional world. Furthermore, such representations may actually deter women from leading or participating in public actions, political campaigns or risky enterprises that attract media attention. Newspaper constructions of prominent women vary from being overtly critical, contemptuous or abusive, to conveying their messages in more subtle, oblique and hidden ways. Because women remain in a tiny minority in senior positions, they stand out as different, and this difference attracts news media attention, often negative. This was the experience of Gina Miller (quoted above). Not only did she suffer gendered and racial abuse in articles by the news media, but also the effect was magnified by public feedback published on social media (Addley 2017; J. Sunderland 2017; Tolhurst 2017). However, the research in this book shows that, more commonly, the pressâ awareness of the equal treatment of women, enshrined in British law (HMSO 2010), encourages blatant or residual, gendered assumptions about women to be suppressed. The purpose of this book is to enable scholars of gender, language and leadership to bring such assumptions to the surface through various forms of discourse analysis, so that they can aid the feminist quest to give space to women leaders â voices where they have been silenced.
This book examines how the British national press construct and represent women leaders and other prominent women in three professional spheres: politics , business , and the entertainment media. I explore the extent to which constructions of women leaders are gendered, stereotyped and at times, sexualised in three newspapers that cross the political spectrum and with different readerships: The Daily Mail, The Sunday Times and The Guardian . I bring gendered assumptions to the surface within all three newspapers where these are suppressed, disguised or silenced. Some readers may query my inclusion of the third newspaper, The Guardian, which generally adopts a liberal feminist stance (News UK 2017) and can be rarely accused of denigrating women. This inclusion is not because I wish to make a critical comparison between those papers that tend to undermine women leaders and those that support and celebrate them. Rather, I argue that The Guardian can offer reductive constructions of women leaders according to a liberal feminist stance that does not always help women leadersâ cause. This stance is predicated on âessentialistâ assumptions about gender that include: binary gendered categories, a universal female nature, and conceptualizing the status of women as victims within patriarchal discourse when the picture is often far more complex. Essentialised assumptions about the social categories of women and men often lead to gender stereotyping of their assumed characteristics ( Coates 2004), which in turn may encourage readers to mock or demonise the news subject.
This book adopts the feminist poststructuralist position that newspaper articles do not consistently construct women in negative or restricted ways, but rather, they offer spaces for multiple and contested meanings (Davies and HarrĂ© 1990; Walkerdine 2002; Weedon 1997). So, even articles that explicitly vilify women leaders provide gaps, ambiguities and contradictions in the text to offer scholars space to make alternative readings. I propose three separate, critical perspectives that will enable scholars to bring buried assumptions to the surface, and thus, to read gendered texts âagainst the grainâ . Each critical perspective provides methods to âdeconstructâ the surface text and produce multifaceted, more empowering constructions of womenâs plural identities ( Derrida 1967). The tri-perspectival approach supports the feminist poststructuralist position that multiple, contrasting âwindowsâ on a text can provide a richer range of textual meanings and insights ( Baxter 2003). They provide a kaleidoscope of diverging ways of viewing, reading, analysing and critiquing newspaper texts that simultaneously supplement yet contest each other (Cooper 1989). All three perspectives should help feminist scholars to progress from the standard approach of critiquing newspaper articles as âsexistâ to delivering multiple, positively charged readings of texts. The proposed approach should not only offer the reader more agency as they deconstruct and reconstruct such articles, but also provide fresh insights about the women leader subjects themselves.
In this chapter, I present the theoretical and conceptual framework of the book, and its key aims. I also discuss my strategic use of the term âwomenâ, why I consider it justified as a provisional, strategic measure, and introduce my argument that challenging binary categories is a significant requirement of feminist deconstructive readings.
Theoretical Background
In this section, I first discuss the core concepts of importance to this book: namely, womenâs leadership, gender, gendered discourses and the relationship between these concepts. I move on to discuss how the news media in general, and newspapers in particular utilise these concepts to construct and represent women leaders , and how these constructions work to shape our perceptions of women leaders. Throughout the book, I refer to the ways women leaders are presented in newspaper articles as âconstructionsâ. This is because these are active, textual formations that convince the reader to accept a given version of reality. Alternatively, I use the term ârepresentation(s)â more specifically to mean âcharacterised according to a given stereotypeâ (see Chaps. 2 and 4). Finally, I introduce three critical perspectives that will be used to compare how the three UK newspapers vary in their constructions of women in senior positions (henceforth, âsenior womenâ). The first is Kanterâs leadership stereotypes model; the second is what I term the âfeminist agenda spectrum â; and the third is a new âreflexiveâ approach adapted from the principles of Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA) . These three perspectives are explained more fully in the following chapters.
Women and Leadership (B)
We are living in unprecedented times when more women have been appointed in positions of senior leadership in politics , business the mass media and many other professions around the globe. Yet women leaders still remain in an overall small minority. Politically, a number of women have become heads of state and heads of government. At the beginning of 2017, elected heads of government included Angela Merkel (Germany), Theresa May (UK), Sheikh Hasina (Bangladesh), Erna Solberg (Norway), Saara Kuugongelwa (Namibia) and Beata Szydlo (Poland). Many more women are heads of state or governor generals around the world. Hilary Clinton narrowly missed becoming the first female President of the USA in 2016, even though she received more individual votes. Regardless, there are still only ten heads of state out of 198 (UN Women 2017). This pattern is also reflected in other professions such as busine...