Access of women and construction of femininity in the discourse of the portuguese press

Abstract

This paper examines some properties of the access of women to the Portuguese press, against the background of a more general discussion about the role of the press in the (re)production of gender inequalities in “western” societies (Gans, 1979; Tuchman, 1978; van Zoonen, 1994; Ayerra, 2003; Gallego, 2005). In particular we examine the sexual composition of the newsrooms and of the newspapers organization and some properties of the written and visual discourse. The analysis of women’s access to newspaper discourse aims to reach two goals: on the one hand, stressing the qualitative and quantitative developments of women’s participation in the newspapers as journalists, based on previous investigation in the Portuguese context (Silveirinha, 2004a, 2004b; Subtil, 2005); on the other hand, showing how gender inequalities are manifested and re(produced) in and by newspaper texts and images . Combining Critical Discourse Analysis (e.g. van Dijk, 1996; van Leeuwen, 1997; Wodak, 1997; Fairclough, 1995; Lazar, 2005) with visual social semiotics (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996, 1998) we analyse some relevant structural categories, written and visual ones, and we show their implications in terms of gender ideologies and inequalities. Following the example of other studies, we have selected one daily edition of Portuguese quality newspapers.