Chapter 2: Who’s that girl?: The (Mis)Representation of Female Corporate Leaders in Time

Many media studies have been conducted focusing on the power of the media to shape cultural opinions. Real (1977) stated that

Mass-mediated culture has the power

Several scholars have examined how women are underrepresented, or misrepresented, in television programs, newspapers and magazines, photographs, and advertising. Many analyses have been conducted regarding media content, looking inside the pages and on the covers of various publications, with several disturbing findings as a result, establishing solid evidence that women and men are treated differently in the media.

Miller (1975), examining the content of news photographs, found 81% of photographs in the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times were of males, while one-fourth of the women featured in the Post were brides. Johnson and Christ (1988) analyzed the covers of Time magazine from 1923–1987, determining that women were pictured on only 14% of the covers. The Johnson and Christ (1988) study examined women covers using the criteria of age, nationality, citizenship, and occupation. Of those covers, the largest occupation featured was artist/entertainer, while women holding positions of leadership in government or business accounted for only 7.5% of covers within this 64-year time period. Their subsequent study, published in 1995, of international women featured on Time’s cover during the same period included 126 women, only one of whom was a business executive (Johnson & Christ, 1995). Also in 1995, the Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP) began providing longitudinal data on gender representations in world media in five-year increments, studying women’s presence in relation to men, gender bias and stereotyping in news media content. Their most recently released data from 2010 indicate that women in professional business occupations are underrepresented, accounting for only 27% of media coverage in the United States of business persons, executive managers, and entrepreneurs (Macharia, O’Connor, & Ndangam, 2010). In 2013, Grandy conducted a quantitative analysis of women’s visibility in U.S. and Canadian business magazines, analyzing one year of publications of the top three U.S. and the top three Canadian business magazines. She discovered that over one year’s time, only four women appeared on the cover of either Bloomberg Businessweek, Forbes, or Fortune magazine, or merely 13.3% of the 30 covers.