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Abstract:
A substantial body of research has demonstrated that news media often present a skewed portrayal of society, particularly with respect to gender. This distorted picture manifests in two main ways : a persistent gap in the exposure of men and women in media content, and the perpetuation of entrenched gender stereotypes in the same content. However, the long-term evolution of these gender disparities in the media remains largely unexplored, primarily due to the lack of accessible, diachronic corpora and the methodological divide between the study of exposure gaps and that of stereotypes. This article addresses these challenges by (a) introducing new, generalizable measures to assess gender disparities in media representation, covering both exposure and stereotypes, and (b) applying these measures to a comprehensive dataset of 3.2 million articles, 13.9 million mentions, and 3.7 million citations from Le Monde, France's leading highbrow newspaper, spanning the years 1944 to 2024. According to our results, while men still dominate the content produced by Le Monde, their share of mentions has decreased from 94% to 74%, and their share of quotes from 98% to 76%. This decline in the masculinity of news has accelerated since 2016 across most news sections except Sports, and in particular in Society and Culture articles. The rise of female journalists in Le Monde’s newsroom (reaching 47% at the end of the studied period) contributes to this trend, as women journalists tend to mention and quote more women than male journalists, increasingly so since 2010. However, despite these shifts, our results show that the stereotyping of both men and women mentioned or quoted in Le Monde, which had steadily decreased from 1945 to 2010, has remained stable since then. This suggests that the recent decrease in the content masculinity has not resulted in more equal treatment of men and women in Le Monde.
