Abstract
Women Leaders and Gender Stereotyping in the UK Press: A Poststructuralist Approach is a new addition to Palgrave Macmillan’s Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse series. It makes a timely and valuable contribution to both critical discourse studies and the gender politics and leadership literature. Author Judith Baxter draws from a corpus of 100 feature stories about women leaders from politics, business, and the mass media, collected from 2014 to 2016, to present three critical perspectives on coverage of women in the UK press: Kanter’s (1993) framework of women leader stereotypes, the feminist agenda spectrum, and the reflexive approach.
The text contains six chapters, each of which begins with an abstract, keywords, and introduction, and concludes with a reference list. This reader-friendly structure is important given the multi-layered analysis which is interwoven with guidance on how to apply the reflexive approach. The author does a fine job of connecting these perspectives and creating a strong sense of internal cohesion to the overall argument. Each chapter stands alone but clearly contributes to the stated aims of the book: to explore if women are depicted as (un) suitable for leadership (Chapter 2), to consider how newspapers position themselves on the feminist agenda spectrum (Chapter 3), to evaluate the employment of three critical perspectives (Chapters 2, 3 and 4), and to consider the reflexive approach’s potential for further newspaper analysis (Chapter 5). The well employed signposting throughout the text strengthens its usability for students and its value as a methodological resource more generally.
Chapter 1 opens with reference to UK businesswoman Gina Miller, who was widely criticised in the British media for initiating a parliamentary vote prior to that country’s exit from the European Union. Her story is presented as emblematic of the central problem with which the book is concerned: ‘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’ (p. 2). While acknowledging that this problem is not confined to Britain, Baxter’s focus is on three UK newspapers (and their online formats): The Daily Mail, The Sunday Times and The Guardian. In Chapter 1, the author clearly explains her media choices, her adoption of the feminist poststructuralist position, the book’s theoretical background and the Feminist Poststructuralist Discourse Analysis (FPDA) method. Importantly, Baxter is reflexive about her own use of the conventional labels of ‘women’ and ‘men’, acknowledging both the limits of these gender categories and their value as working terms in the absence of established, more transformational possibilities.
Chapter 2 begins with discussion of Kanter’s (1993) conceptual framework of women leader ‘role traps’ (p. 24) or stereotypes (iron maiden or battle-axe, mother or school marm, seductress, pet). These traps are visually depicted in the book by cartoons from Danish illustrator Bob Katzenelson. The author adds ‘queen bee’ to these criteria, though no accompanying cartoon is provided. After providing a breakdown of the appearance of these five stereotypes across her corpus, Baxter proceeds to a fascinating discourse and semiotic analysis of three articles about Teresa May’s first day as British Prime Minister. Here, she argues that May is constructed predominantly as an iron maiden and battle-axe but also as a queen bee: ‘not necessarily depicted as unsuitable for leadership; rather, she is constructed as a monstrous version of what a leader is expected to be’ (p. 48, original emphasis). One highlight of the book is this type of qualitative case study of leaders’ newspaper coverage, which also features in Chapters 3 and 5.
In Chapter 3, Baxter first explains the feminist agenda spectrum which she then employs to analyse how the press ‘mobilise a given agenda in relation to feminism’ (p. 52) in stories about British fashion designer and business leader Tamara Mellon. Different points on the spectrum are illustrated through the author’s careful selection and analysis of her three chosen newspapers’ treatment of Mellon, ranging from female-friendly or pro-feminist (The Guardian), through gender-neutral (The Sunday Times) to female-hostile and/or anti-feminist (The Daily Mail). As in the previous chapter, where Baxter observes ‘hints of alternative and contesting voices’ in coverage of Teresa May, ‘small ruptures and contradictions’ (p. 71) are also noted here. These observations pave the way for Chapters 4 and 5 which discuss the reflexive approach and its enablement of the ability to read articles ‘against the grain’ (p. viii). Chapter 4 focuses on the principles and methodology of the reflexive approach, explaining how it can be applied across four dimensions: microlinguistic, textual, representational, and discoursal, while Chapter 5 demonstrates how these strategies can be put into practice, with reference to three more articles about professional women leaders from her corpus.
Given the book’s stated commitment to developing a ‘clear, step-by-step methodology’ (p. viii), it would be helpful if there were at least some accompanying reproductions of the newspaper articles analysed by the author. While weblinks are provided to online versions of the selected stories, Baxter notes her corpus was in fact a combination of both hard copy and online articles. It is not explained whether these two forms were always identical in textual and visual content (e.g. the web address of ‘The Steel Lady Strikes’ is provided in Chapter 2, but the article is subsequently described in terms of its printed format). Furthermore, the book’s reliance on providing weblinks for readers to access full stories is risky: this Southern Hemisphere reviewer was variously hindered by a slightly inaccurate URL in Chapter 3 (p. 61), the need to register on The Sunday Times site before being given access to complete stories and being automatically taken to an Australian version of The Daily Mail. While Baxter’s descriptions of stories are certainly rich, many readers – particularly students and those new to discourse analysis – would enjoy or benefit from seeing the full text and visual imagery of an article alongside at least some of her analysis.
The final chapter revisits the author’s aims for the book. It includes a particularly useful table of strategies for applying the reflexive approach and some suggestions for its use, primarily by scholars and students but also by a wider audience. By explaining how different levels of analysis can be performed and adopted in professional settings such as teaching, public relations and advertising (as some of the author’s own former students attest), the book supports its claim that ‘the methodology of the reflexive approach does not need to be complicated’ (p. 154).
Women Leaders and Gender Stereotyping in the UK Press begins and ends with reference to the media treatment received by UK businesswoman Gina Miller. That women leaders continue to be dogged by censorious media coverage is a further reminder of the ongoing need for empirical work which documents the prevalence and forms of gendered representations in the contemporary news environment. But beyond delivering such work, Baxter also successfully demonstrates how the reflexive approach might provide ‘one small way in which scholars can help to transform conditions by re-imagining and reconstructing how women leaders are represented in the public domain’ (p. 155). The real value of the book is that while apparently modest in this ambition, the convincing execution and engaging style offer very tangible transformative possibilities, to a range of readers.