MEDIA: REPRESENTATIONS of GENDER

Tuchman claimed that women are represented in a narrow range of roles in the media, whilst men occupy a full range of social and occupational roles. Roles for women mainly include housewives, mothers and sex objects. They are hardly shown as doctors or lawyers, but if they are, then they are often shown to have problems dealing with 'unusual circumstances'. For example, they are portrayed as unfulfilled, unattractive or as having problems with their relationships. If they have a successful career, women are sometimes shown as irresponsible, with their children getting into trouble due to their emotional neglect. Not only this, but women are seen as vunerable victims in need of protection by men/from men (King-Kong). However, Tuchman's research can be classes as out dated, as the media has seen some transgressive improvements with representations of gender. For example, the fearless female and heroine 'Katniss' from 'The Hunger Games'. 

Globally, men are the subject of more news stories in comparison to women. The Global Media Monitoring Project discovered that 76% of people across the globe heard/read/seen in media were male, whether that be in print, TV news, the radio and on websites. Only 24% were women, who were also 4x more likely to be identified by their family status than men. Nearly half of the news stories reinforced gender stereotypes - almost 8x higher than stories which challenge such stereotypes. The report concluded that the world depicted in the news remains predominantly male, thus suggesting that women's issues have been marginalised. 

This idea of women's identities being destroyed and their issues being pushed to the side is described by Tuchman as 'symbolic annihilation', whereby the media destroys what it is to be a woman. The Women in Journalism found that just 3% of sports journalists…