Changing representations of women: The Courier Mail over four decades

Abstract

This paper studies the representation of women in the front-page news of the Courier mail daily newspaper over the last four decades of the twentieth century. It finds that the representation of women incrementally increased during the period under study, but that the women were consistently under-represented compared to men and tended to be represented as engaged in a limited, feminised repertoire of activities. The percentage of stories about or mentioning women was also substantially less than the percentage of of women active in the public sphere. The study attributes the under-representation to the nature of newsroom cultures. It concludes that the efforts of feminists to raise the consciousness of newspaper staff and increasing percentages of women working in the Courier Mail have not transformed the institutional newspaper routines that would facilitate higher quantity and quality of representation of women in front-page news.