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Ms. Prime Minister: Gender, Media, and Leadership
Ms. Prime Minister offers both solace and words of caution for women politicians. After closely analyzing the media coverage of former Canadian Prime Minister Kim Campbell; two former Prime Ministers of New Zealand, Jenny Shipley and Helen Clark; and Australia’s 27 th Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, Linda Trimble concludes that reporting both reinforces and contests unfair gender norms. News about female leaders gives undue attention to their gender identities, bodies and family lives. Yet equivalent men are also treated to evaluations of their gendered personas. And, as Trimble finds, some media accounts expose sexism and authenticate women's performances of leadership. Ms. Prime Minister provides important insight into the news frameworks that work to deny or confer political legitimacy. It concludes with advice designed to inform the gender strategies of women who aspire to political leadership roles and the reporting techniques of the journalists who cover them.
328 pages, Paperback
Published December 19, 2017
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February 24, 2025I accidentally deleted this but don’t worry guys, I got an A- on my book review😎
February 17, 2023
In writing my PhD, I have come up with a few lines of thought. Reading this Dr Trimble had also thought of them. A very inspiring book for my own work and career. Highly recommend reading it if you’ve ever found yourself wondering what I think about all day at the moment.
April 21, 2024
I want to preface this by saying that gendered mediation seems like a very interesting and important topic (this book is my first introduction to the field). However, this book has two gaping flaws that I think ruin the whole thing:
1. The sample size. Trimble acknowledges the small sample as a limitation of the study, but I would argue the sample size invalidates the whole thing. Studying a sample as small as ten people over eight elections, and even then only counting a few hundred news articles for each election, nearly guarantees that the results will not be statistically significant. This study ends up extremely prone to random noise, which Trimble plays into at times (how much of the criticism of Kim Campbell's speaking style can really be attributed to her being a woman if none of the other three PMs in the study experienced such intense shade?). Also, the fact that all the PMs in the study are similar-ish women from the very similar countries of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This study has basically no generality, and it's possible that many of the results will not hold across different countries or even different governmental positions. Additionally, this study suffers from survivor bias as it only focuses on women who actually succeeded in becoming Prime Ministers. Maybe studying Hillary Clinton or Belinda Stronach would give more information on how the media covers all female candidates for top office. To her credit, Trimble is aware of this and mentions these criticisms in the conclusion. However, I think that making the decision to exclude women from non-Five Eyes countries, women who lost elections, and women in slightly lower office is an unforgivable restriction of the sample that renders the study conclusions rather unscientific. However, a study doesn't have to be really scientific or statistically significant to be useful (the statistician in me cried writing this). Case studies can be quite enlightening! However, Ms. Prime Minister also fails as a case study because there's two many women in the study. Focusing on the similarities and differences between four women makes it difficult to see the underlying similarities of they're media coverage.
2. The thesis is pointless. Proving that the media sometimes reinforces and sometimes discredits gendered structures is nearly the same as proving nothing at all. While Trimble does go into considerable detail about the specific ways in which the PMs genders are framed and interpreted by the media, there really is no central theme or point tying everything together, because the main point is that the media says many things about female politicians. There is a reasonable amount of evidence presented in the book that the media does sometimes seek to break down gender stereotypes, but that's really not new information to anyone (literally go ask a random person on the street if the media is always sexist and never supports women).
Aside from these too main points, I have a short laundry list of other things wrong with the book.
1. Too wordy (I recognize this is crazy coming from someone who's writing such a long review). The book easily could've been like a third shorter if Trimble spoke plainly and didn't have a lot of intro and conclusion text.
2. Didn't include Margaret Thatcher??????
3. Talked a lot about how Kim Campbell's speaking style was critiqued while totally ignoring why Shipley, Clark, and Gillard's speaking styles weren't critiqued in the same way.
1. The sample size. Trimble acknowledges the small sample as a limitation of the study, but I would argue the sample size invalidates the whole thing. Studying a sample as small as ten people over eight elections, and even then only counting a few hundred news articles for each election, nearly guarantees that the results will not be statistically significant. This study ends up extremely prone to random noise, which Trimble plays into at times (how much of the criticism of Kim Campbell's speaking style can really be attributed to her being a woman if none of the other three PMs in the study experienced such intense shade?). Also, the fact that all the PMs in the study are similar-ish women from the very similar countries of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. This study has basically no generality, and it's possible that many of the results will not hold across different countries or even different governmental positions. Additionally, this study suffers from survivor bias as it only focuses on women who actually succeeded in becoming Prime Ministers. Maybe studying Hillary Clinton or Belinda Stronach would give more information on how the media covers all female candidates for top office. To her credit, Trimble is aware of this and mentions these criticisms in the conclusion. However, I think that making the decision to exclude women from non-Five Eyes countries, women who lost elections, and women in slightly lower office is an unforgivable restriction of the sample that renders the study conclusions rather unscientific. However, a study doesn't have to be really scientific or statistically significant to be useful (the statistician in me cried writing this). Case studies can be quite enlightening! However, Ms. Prime Minister also fails as a case study because there's two many women in the study. Focusing on the similarities and differences between four women makes it difficult to see the underlying similarities of they're media coverage.
2. The thesis is pointless. Proving that the media sometimes reinforces and sometimes discredits gendered structures is nearly the same as proving nothing at all. While Trimble does go into considerable detail about the specific ways in which the PMs genders are framed and interpreted by the media, there really is no central theme or point tying everything together, because the main point is that the media says many things about female politicians. There is a reasonable amount of evidence presented in the book that the media does sometimes seek to break down gender stereotypes, but that's really not new information to anyone (literally go ask a random person on the street if the media is always sexist and never supports women).
Aside from these too main points, I have a short laundry list of other things wrong with the book.
1. Too wordy (I recognize this is crazy coming from someone who's writing such a long review). The book easily could've been like a third shorter if Trimble spoke plainly and didn't have a lot of intro and conclusion text.
2. Didn't include Margaret Thatcher??????
3. Talked a lot about how Kim Campbell's speaking style was critiqued while totally ignoring why Shipley, Clark, and Gillard's speaking styles weren't critiqued in the same way.
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