The year of the missing woman: an analysis of women as sources and subjects in 2018 midterm campaign coverage by Texas newspapers

ABSTRACT

In light of the historic gains made by women in the 2018 midterm elections—both as candidates and as newly elected officials—an updated assessment of gender parity in campaign coverage is warranted. The results of an empirical discourse analysis show that despite record numbers of women serving in both the United States House of Representatives and Senate, men as candidates, journalists, and quoted sources dominate the reporting landscape. The results foreground a neglect of women as candidates for office and of women as quoted sources in the discussion of political campaigns, regardless of reporter gender. Women’s voices and candidacies do not survive in political reporting, even when the reporter is a woman. These results may be due to both structural biases in the political arena writ large—mirrored by press organizations—and gendered practices in the newsroom.

KEYWORDS:

• Journalism
• campaign reporting
• gender
• discourse
• midterm elections

Acknowledgment

I would like to thank Mary Bock for her careful feedback and guidance. I am also grateful for the two anonymous reviewers and their productive insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The data the support the findings of this study are openly available in the author’s Harvard Dataverse at https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/O5LGRP.

Notes

1. This is not to say gender is immutable, static, or eternal. Gender can, of course, change over time or across contexts. However, by treating each news article as cross-sectional data—a snapshot of the moment of publication—I can identify the gender identity of each subject at that particular moment. The moment of publication, rather than moments before or after when identity may shift, is key because it captures the version of reality a journalist chose to present: who they chose to cover, who they chose to quote.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Dakota Park-Ozee

Dakota Park-Ozee is an assistant professor of political communication at the University of Denver. She is interested in discourses of identity and dominant narratives in U.S. public and political life. These include class- and gender-based identities across popular, press, and elite contexts.