Chapter 1: Is She Really Into It?: The Media as Misleading in Its Portrayals of Female Executives’ Work–Family (Im)Balance

From well-respected print news outlets to television to movies, mainstream media has always played a key role in how women are perceived and, correspondingly, stereotyped. This is no less true when it comes to women in leadership and executive-level positions. Such a directional impact is suggested by the transmission model (Carey, 2008; Kelan, 2013), whereby media input influences how female leaders are perceived by society, which, in turn, informs the opportunities available to them and the identities they assume. This model serves as the foundation for the majority of media research (Jensen, 2002) and has recently been enhanced (Craig, 2013) to stress the importance of a meta-theoretical perspective of the transmission model, which emphasizes cultural and societal shifts, as is evident in the examples and arguments used throughout this chapter. This chapter also aligns with van Zoonen’s (1994) emphasis on the role played by the transmission model in regard to media portrayals of women specifically, highlighting the need for the aforementioned cultural and societal considerations.