Situational effects of journalistic resources on gender imbalances in the coverage of Swiss news media: a longitudinal analysis from 2011 to 2019

Abstract

Gender imbalances in news coverage have been traced back to overarching societal structures and the characteristics of media companies, newsrooms and journalists. However, studies have rarely considered if and how journalistic resources can act situationally as drivers of gender imbalances. We investigated how often and in which contexts women are represented in Swiss news media articles between 2011 and 2019 (n = 77,427) by combining manual and automated content analysis on a large scale. We looked at representation in general and the dependence of topic and media type, in addition to the influence of two resource-related features of news content: the source and the format. The study showed clear gender imbalances, which were heavily dependent on the topics in the news coverage. We found that when journalists relied on original reporting instead of news agencies and used contextualizing formats women were more frequently mentioned in the news. Our results, therefore, suggest that resources can situationally determine the representation of women in the news.