Representing women? Leadership roles and women in Canadian broadcast news
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the representation of women in Canadian broadcast news coverage, exploring the notion of substantive representation as it relates to gender, leadership and framing. Design/methodology/approach Using computer-aided text analysis software, the authors analyzed the frequency of women appearing in on-air roles, the way in which they are framed, as well as technical and expressive details, such as how they are featured. In total, the authors analyzed representation of 2,031 individuals in the four suppertime local news broadcasts from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Framed in an ecological model of complex social change, this paper focuses on understanding how women are presented in Canadian broadcast media. Findings This study finds that women are under-represented in Canadian broadcast media. Furthermore, it finds that women are less likely to be framed as leaders or experts and are less likely to hold news host or anchor positions. For all major news broadcasters analyzed, women are less likely to be portrayed positively or in leadership/expert positions and are more often represented as victims. They are less likely to appear on screen and are more likely to be referred to off-screen, paraphrased and cited rather than speaking for themselves. Research limitations/implications By framing this study in an (critical) ecological, this study moved beyond required descriptive benchmarking to examine the degree of substantive representation of women. However, the sample of the study is only a snapshot of Canada’s largest city, and, therefore, more research involving further a comparative analysis of cities, a variety of print sources and online media outlets is needed. Future research might include more qualitative analysis of the representation, the type of representation and the factors affecting levels of representation. For example, such research might explore the practices in broadcast organizations, the way in which stories are framed and how guests selected. Also of interest is the relationship between women’s representation at the decision-making table, as an input, and the representation of women in on-air roles, as an outcome. Practical implications The implications of this article are important for understanding the complex factors affecting female leadership across sectors, particularly, the Canadian broadcast industry, the barriers they face and the strategies that may lead to their advancement. Originality/value This study moved beyond descriptive benchmarking to examine the degree of substantive representation of women by coding the frames, roles and means of quotation experienced by women on broadcast news.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".