On their best behaviour? Newspaper journalists' coverage of women municipal candidates in Alberta
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Do women in municipal politics encounter the same level of media bias as women in national politics? Does every type of newspapers exhibit a bias against women municipal politicians, if at all? These questions guided a study of how three daily and three community newspapers portrayed women council candidates during the 2007 Alberta municipal elections. Using content and discourse analysis, the study compared how journalists reported on female and male candidates’ personal traits such as age, appearance, family situation, gender, and emotions as well as their policy ideas and public utterances. Results from the study indicate that while local women politicians do face a subtle sexism, the media environment they encounter while campaigning is generally more gender-neutral and hospitable to them than the one awaiting women vying for elite national office. Thus, women contemplating a bid for council should not be concerned that local journalists will obsess about their looks or otherwise overtly disadvantage them before prospective voters.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it