Gendered News: Media Coverage and Electoral Politics in Canada

In the last fifty years, many of the institutional and societal barriers keeping Canadian women from public office have disappeared. Yet today, women hold only a quarter of the seats in the House of Commons – a proportion that rose by just seven percentage points between 1993 and 2011. In this illuminating study, Elizabeth Goodyear-Grant examines a significant obstacle still facing women in political life: gendered media coverage. Based on interviews with MPs and party leaders, and on an analysis of print and television media in the 2000 and 2006 federal elections, Gendered News reveals an unsettling climate that affects the success of women in office, and that could deter them from running at all.