Interview with Karen Dacy: Linguistic study reveals discrimination against women in politics beyond traditional gender stereotypes

In this interview, Karen Dacy discusses her co-authored Journal of Language and Politics article with Lesley Stirling, ‘Serial rorters or mere mortals? Gendered mediation in comments to newspapers about how male and female government leaders handle money: An Australian study.' She talks about why she explored this theme using linguistic frameworks and where she hopes to go with it next.

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

The preponderance of negative comments on female politicians’ handling of money may represent an attempt, conscious or otherwise to delegitimise women in politics by associating them with misuse of an important conduit of social power.

Why did you decide to write this piece?

The cabinet of Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, included many more of female members than previous governments. Reading both mainstream and social media contributions, I was constantly dismayed at the volume of negativity expressed toward female parliamentarians and the contrasting tolerance expressed toward the actions of male politicians. Meanwhile I read a constant refrain in newspaper comments and social media that criticisms were nothing to do with sexism but reflected the female politician’s faults and shortcomings. I also noted similar sounding criticisms of female politicians overseas, including Hillary Clinton and Dilma Rousseff. I decided that to demonstrate greater discrimination by commenters against female politicians, I would need a large sample of social media comments on a range of female politicians. To show that such criticisms were sparked by gender rather than other characteristics, I would need to contrast comments on female with male  politicians. Comments appended to newspaper articles were chosen because they are in the public domain and therefore accessible, and because they commented on  a wide range of female politicians, while social media failed to include comments on many women in key government positions, this itself a finding.

I selected Corpus Assisted Discourse Study (CADS) as a methodology for analysing these comments, because it is based around a social question, and uses linguistic and thematic analysis to demonstrate a social phenomenon. Linguistic analysis is key because, as Fairclough notes ‘we live in a linguistic epoch’ (2001, p.245) in which language reflects, creates and reinforces the structure of the social matrix (2001, p.290).

I used Wmatrix corpus analysing software  (Rayson 2002) to organise and tags the collected comments both by macro-themes or Key Concepts and by linguistic structures. I fed in a sample of 20,000 comments, split into different corpora by gender and was flabbergasted to discover that comments on females were markedly more likely to contain comments about the politician’s handling of money or finances – and to be overwhelmingly negative in their assessment of this.

This made sense according to the theory of Social Stratification (Fiske, 2010) which tells us that the values of society and hence what is morally acceptable or disfavoured, are determined by the most powerful cohorts. Money is the conduit of power, and remains more closely adhered to the male domain, as seen in relative incomes by gender. It may also be reflected in current international politics, where high income (male) individuals have claimed enormous amounts of executive power.

We should recall that female entry into the fiscal domain is relatively recent.  In earlier years women were unable to own property and frequently required to leave paid employment once married. It is therefore not surprising that public commentary expressed distrust of women in fiscally responsible positions. As a conduit of social power, money in female hands represents a violation of traditional distribution of executive and social power.

What are the key takeaways?

The key takeaways of our article are firstly, that discrimination by gender is by no means limited to overtly sexist or female-related commentary, such as reference to appearance, dress or traditionally female occupations like caring and childcare. The preponderance of negative comments on female politicians’ handling of money may represent an attempt, conscious or otherwise to delegitimise women in politics by associating them with misuse of an important conduit of social power. Further, such money-related commentary is easily passed over on a cursory daily reading of the newspaper and only revealed by a large-scale analysis.

Secondly, there is considerable evidence that commenters exaggerate and hence weaponise specific themes to discredit disfavoured groups. Handling of public money is a key role of politicians, and misuse or misspending should render them cardinally unsuitable for their role. There is evidence in the literature that many disfavoured cohorts in society are accused of behaviours that delegitimise them in society. Female journalists and writers have been frequently accused of having poor writing skills. Migrants have been accused of being unruly and criminally inclined neighbours.

Thirdly, a linguistic analysis of the strength of opinion of commenters, measured in intensifiers (words like ‘very’, ‘greatly’ etc) and intensified lexicon (e.g. choice of ‘evil’ versus ‘bad’) demonstrates powerful emotional reaction to those groups who challenge the current social order.

Where do you plan to go next in your research?

I plan to examine current and future comments on female politicians, or women in leadership positions in general, to ascertain whether acceptance of females in a leadership role has increased, and also to track the evolution of key themes applied to these women. As social conditions evolve, new themes may be applied to women in leadership, either to support or denounce them. This would establish whether choice of themes reflects real events and actions by the politician or is used strategically to delegitimise.

I also want to delve more deeply into the theme of crime and ethics, which was also prominent in the corpora used in this study. Such themes have been evident in studies of a wide number of disfavoured cohorts, based on religion, ethnicity or class. This would reinforce  strthe proposition that many disfavoured groups are denounced not for their behaviours, but as a tactic to marginalise or remove them from society.