'He' vs 'she' in Australian media coverage: what the language of news tells us about gender imbalance
- Written by Annabelle Lukin, Associate professor, Macquarie University
In the dying days of Australia’s first female prime ministership, then PM Julia Gillard struck out against the “blue tie brigade”. If Tony Abbott was elected, she argued, women would be “once again banished from the centre of Australia’s political life”.
News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt called her a “sexist monster”. Even some of Gillard’s colleagues distanced themselves from her comments.
Gillard’s experience of sexism ranged from deeply misogynistic commentary – one radio host said she should be put in a chaff bag and thrown overboard – to the everyday, unconscious assumption that mainstream public life is, purely and simply, the domain of men.
A new and large corpus of Australian newspaper articles compiled by linguists at Lancaster University’s Corpus Approaches to Social Science Research Centre can help us investigate the gender imbalance in Australian public life.
The collection - consisting of nearly 13,000 articles and close to 7.4 million words - provides an extremely rich data source for studying the Australian media. The data comes from 18 Australian newspapers including The Adelaide Advertiser, The Age, The Australian, The Canberra Times, The Courier Mail, The Daily Telegraph, The Sydney Morning Herald, The West Australian, The Northern Territory News and The Hobart Mercury, among others.
It includes all news articles published over 12 months from August 2015 to July 2016 that contained one of the following keywords: Australia, Australian, or Australians.
In any large set of text, the most frequently used words are the smallest - words like “the”, “to”, “and”, “of” and “a”. But not too far down this list is the male pronoun: “he”.
Of nearly 100,000 distinct words used in the collected news articles, “he” was the 16th most frequently used. By comparison, the equivalent female pronoun - “she” - was the 66th most frequently used. “She” turned up 11,765 times, while “he” appeared more than 40,000 times.
That makes the ratio of “he” to “she” in Australian news reporting 3.4 to 1.
Unfortunately, we don’t have comparable data from the period of Gillard’s leadership. It seems likely that, with a female prime minister, this gap would have been narrower.
If you are a “he” or “she” in a text, it means you have a prominent grammatical role - you are the subject of the clause, and you have lasted long enough in the story to graduate from proper name to pronoun.
We can also examine the frequency of combinations of words, like “he said” versus “she said”. Of the articles in the corpus, “he said” appeared 9,892 times compared to “she said” at 2,709 – a ratio of roughly 3.6 to 1. That tells us something important about whose voices are being heard in Australian news media.
Pronouns aren’t the only indicator. The use of proper names – such as Peter, Paul and Malala – also give us clues. The table below is a list of the top 21 names published in the year’s worth of news articles. Why 21? The top 20 are all male names. It was not until I got to the 21st proper name in the corpus that I found a female name.
There’s a good chance the name “Julia” would have appeared in the top five when Gillard was Prime Minister. It’s no coincidence that the top female name in the list is “Julie” – the same name as Australia’s Foreign Minister.
Authors: Annabelle Lukin, Associate professor, Macquarie University