The Women Who Wanted to be President in 2020 and the Media who Watched Them

Lewyckyj, Kataryna

Publication

The Women Who Wanted to be President in 2020 and the Media who Watched Them

Lewyckyj, Kataryna

Date

2021

Additional date(s)

2021-05-19

Abstract

Women have, and continue to be, underrepresented in political positions of power, and politics as a whole. This study compares the variation between how the men and women who ran for the Democratic Presidential Nomination were evaluated by news media outlets when they withdrew their candidacy. The dataset consisted of seven news outlets that were chosen by meeting both cross referencing a Pew Research Institute study and a Forbes ranking of face-based outlets in addition to other selection criteria. Seven candidates, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, and Andrew Yang, who all met a debate invitation threshold were chosen to be part of this study. Once gathered, the data was coded using a sentiment approach and a set of original rules detailed in the attached appendix. The findings show that there was not a significant difference between the male and female presidential candidates when examining the modifiers or normative judgements used to describe the candidate's withdrawals from the primary election, but even the slight variations can be used to advance understanding of the relationship between media, gender, and politics.