The Effects of Vietnamese Online Newspapers on Gender Inequality:A CaseStudy of the Representation of Women Leaders in Vietnamnet and VnExpress

Tóm tắt

Online newspapers have a key role in contemporary societies in shaping public opinion about women, and correspondingly, stereotyping them,
especially women in leadership roles. In Vietnam, previous research has primarily focused on women leaders’ visibility in the media and stereotyped frames, leaving their roles when featured in news articles largely unexplored.This research proposes a multi-layered framework to understand how Vietnamese online newspapers represent women leaders and how this can create an additional challenge for women in general by examining 400 samples from Vietnamnet and VnExpress. Overall, women leaders’s voices are disproportionately featured in all fields. In addition, a discursive pattern is also found: a woman can only be seen as a successful leader when she can excel at business and family simultaneously. Such exclusion, misrepresentation, and discrimination in the news toward women leaders would send messages to audiences that women are not eligible to hold high positions and, therefore could deepen gender inequality and obscure challenges faced by women. The result suggests that journalists should shift their views on women leaders and involve more women in news articles as well as highlight gender inequality problems.