The role of linguistic choices and stylistic and visual devices in the gendered representation of British female leaders: A multimodal analysis of British online news with a focus on headlines

Throughout history, women have always been victims of long-established biases that mirrored and supported collectively approved views of gender. Although many stereotypes have declined over the years, traditional gender roles still govern and affect women and men’s lives around the world. In particular, as women have progressively reached male-dominated professions globally, discrimination based on gender still challenges their professional careers at executive positions. These prejudices can be observed in the way online news articles construct the identity of British female leaders. Within this framework, the present study aims at analysing specific linguistic, stylistic and visual devices of news headlines following the Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA) and Multimodal News Analysis (MNA). The corpus includes articles from four British online newspapers which differ in terms of political affiliation, namely, the right-leaning Daily Mail and The Telegraph, the center-left The Guardian, and the left-leaning Mirror. The textual and visual elements examined often contribute to constructing a gendered representation of female leaders, which may shape the readers’ perception on their leadership skills and consequently damage their professional careers.