Thursday, August 23, 2018

Gendered Coverage of American Politicians' Sins


I wrote about that in March, but the problems in coverage haven't since disappeared*.  It's always useful to make the thought experiment, when reading criticisms of some female politician, of asking if the criticisms would have been the same or of equal intensity had she been a male politician instead.

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* Much of this is caused by the right-wing press, because there are many more Democratic female politicians than there are Republican ones, and the right-wing press attacks Democrats and not Republicans.  But even so, I sense a difference in the intensity when the target of attack is female.

As an aside, the small numbers of Republican women in the Congress is probably caused by the same reasons as the tilted right-wing coverage against Democratic women.