Female Political Leadership: A Comparison between Media Treatment of Ana Botella and Manuela Carmena’ during Their First Week in Charge

Abstract

Only 19.09% of Spain mayoralties were occupied by women in the 2015 elections. Ana Botella and Manuela Carmena are the only female mayors that Madrid has ever had and they possess different vital political profiles. However, gender stereotypes are so deeply rooted in collective memory that we found several common characterizations or gender frames in the first week in charge for both women in El Mundo, El País, ABC and La Razón: they are personable, kind people, someone’s puppet —a man, always— and they don’t have enough preparation for the position. Through a qualitative analysis in texts that mention or show pictures of these women, we discover that Carmena has a significantly more negative quantitative and qualitative portrait, especially in the most conservative newspapers. Thus, in this intragender comparison, we find that enduring differences stem from ideological issues and the economic elite, who owns the media, and that there are coincidences in gender frames used in the service of the newspapers’ editorial line.