Weihua Ye

Women in the Assembly: Representations of Female Assembly Members in the Welsh National Press Weihua Ye

Women held 31 seats out of 60 in the second Welsh Assembly; yet female AMs were less visible than male AMs in the Welsh media. This book attempts to look at the ways in which women AMs were represented in three Welsh national newspapers during the 2007 Assembly election. The research is based on in-depth interviews with fifteen female AMs in the third Assembly and two journalists at a major Welsh newspaper. It also draws on content and discourse analysis of the election coverage of the AMs in the three newspapers during a three-month period. The study concludes that the Welsh national press coverage of the Assembly and its AMs was rather limited. Futhermore, male AMs received significantly more coverage than female AMs. In addition, sexist and negative coverage of female AMs did exist, but not as much as when the Assembly first started in 1999. This work will be interesting to any one interested in politics, gender and media studies.