Ross, Karen. Women, Politics, Media: Uneasy Relations in Comparative Perspective.

Raphael, Chad

Ross, Karen. Women, Politics, Media: Uneasy Relations in Comparative Perspective. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002. Pp. x, 222. ISBN 1-57273-397-7 (hb.) $49.50; 1-57273-398-5 (pb.) $23.95.

As women increased their numbers in many national legislatures in the 1990s, her own experience as a candidate for local office in mid-1990s Britain inspired Karen Ross, Reader in Mass Communication at Coventry University, to write a book about the news media's and political parties' treatment of women in politics. Her interviews with women parliamentarians in three countries revealed that party leaders and journalists shared a trivializing focus on women politicians' appearance and identities as wives and mothers, rarely allowing them to be considered as politicians first, women second.

Most prior research on women and politics has focused on the U.S. context, and Ross summarizes some of it here. Yet the new data offered in this book are drawn from the author's interviews with women politicians in the UK, Australia, and South Africa. This new evidence is the book's strength, as Ross has elicited some relatively unguarded, incisive, and often witty denunciations of discrimination against women parliamentarians from the officials themselves. Ross uses her interviewees' stories and observations to support her two major arguments--that politics has become less of an old boys' network than many might think, and that the news media harm democracy by discouraging women's participation (even more than men's). Ross finds that journalism contributes to driving women from politics by ignoring women politicians' policy work and issues that women tend to tell pollsters are more salient to them (such as health care, education, and welfare). And, she argues, the news media undermine women politicians by obsessing about their dress and how they balance work and family life. Ross's informants perceive women journalists as no more likely to overcome the traditional bias of coverage, given their need to please male news editors, advance professionally, or work within their news outlet's political orientation.

However, the interviews are also the book's chief weakness. Many of the book's arguments about news coverage (and I sympathize with them) would be better supported by systematic content analysis of news stories themselves, rather than simply by the claims of some women parliamentarians about news coverage. In addition, despite a healthy list of interviewees included in an appendix, only a handful of them account for the vast majority of quotes here. Moreover, the comparative view between countries that is promised in the book's subtitle never emerges. Instead, we are told that "the experiences of women politicians across different continents is remarkably similar" (p. 4) because patriarchy and capitalism are global phenomena. Yet each country faced unique sets of issues and political dynamics in the 1990s. Most notably, South African women were not merely emerging from the shadows of male rule, but apartheid. Surely, this had some differentiating impact on the relation of women to media and politics. How were white and black women leaders treated by the South African media?

The first half of the book examines women in politics, sans media. A brief introduction is followed by a chapter summarizing the literature on women and the political process. Here, Ross canvasses the major theoretical controversies related to gender and politics, such as the distinction between the private and public spheres, the range of feminist political strategies, and the debate over whether women offer (or ought to) a different political culture reflecting traditional maternal values (nurturance, consensus, compassion, and so on). The author also summarizes the empirical literature on how women participate differently in politics, arguments for increasing women's engagement in politics, contemporary barriers to women candidates, and affirmative action efforts to recruit more women to office. Chapter 3 examines evidence supporting and challenging claims that women legislate differently than men and employ a distinct political style, concluding that although women have shifted parliamentary policy agendas somewhat, such change is often limited by women's need to avoid crossing male party leaders and public opinion.

The book's second half focuses on media coverage of women in politics. Chapter 4 argues that media agenda-setting privileges coverage of male politicians, issues, and formats (such as aggressive television roundtable programs), and that journalism primes citizens to focus on women politicians' appearance, gender, and family life. Chapter 5 discusses ways that women negotiate with the media, attempting to manage coverage to their advantage. Chapter 6 examines the media's role in elections, discussing research comparing male and female candidates' campaign speeches and advertisements for issue focus and tone.

Women, Politics, Media is accessibly written, and could therefore be used in upper division undergraduate courses on media and politics, gender and mass media, and a range of women's studies courses. The book offers a reasonably current summary of work on gender and political communication. References, and author and subject indexes are included.

--Chad Raphael