Women politicians in Austria: Still not breaking the media ceiling

This is an academic study (Hayek, Mayrl and Russmann, published in Communications) examining the underrepresentation of women politicians in Austrian media coverage, a pattern the authors describe as persistent across many contemporary democracies. It draws on the 2019 Austrian election campaign, notable for the first female top candidate of a major party, a caretaker government with equal numbers of men and women, and the country's first woman chancellor.

The study set out to examine whether these 2019 developments changed how women politicians were represented in campaign media coverage, and whether gender bias in election coverage was easing.

The researchers conducted a quantitative content analysis of Austrian newspaper articles (N = 16,125) spanning four national parliamentary election campaigns: 2008, 2013, 2017 and 2019.

The analysis covered 16,125 newspaper articles across the four campaigns studied.

The study finds that the media ceiling for women politicians is, at best, slowly lifting, but that holding positions of power offers the most promising route for women to evade gendered media bias.