It is now more than one hundred years since women gained the right to vote and stand as parliamentary candidates in the UK. Just as progress to reach that point was somewhat glacial, progress since that time has been almost as slow. While women became members of parliament quite soon after women's suffrage, it would take six decades before a woman was elected prime minister for the first time. Throughout the subsequent century, the social and political lives of these women would change dramatically as a result of the political advocacy and activism of countless women (Cowman, 2010). Political discourse has also changed significantly over the same period because, as various legislation has been enacted to usher more and more citizens into the electorate, political parties have needed to appeal to an increasingly diverse and growing polity. The expansion of democracy placed new emphasis on the role of journalism and its ability to inform voters about politics and hold those in power to account (Temple, 2008). News media have, then, always been important in shaping what issues citizens ought to care about and whose voices are important in political debate. It is therefore crucial that news coverage of politics is inclusive and reflects the issues and concerns of all citizens.

Some twenty-five years ago (at the time of publication), Annabelle Sreberny and Karen Ross remarked that ‘work in political communication has tended to lack a gender dimension, while feminist work on the media has tended to focus on entertainment formats, rather than the “fact-based” genre of current affairs that address the viewer as a gendered citizen’ (Sreberny-Mohammadi & Ross, 1996: 103). To some extent, this remains true today. While there has been a noticeable increase in studies examining the mediated representation of women in political news, upon which this study builds, a cursory glance at the substantial array of academic studies which analyze electoral coverage in general suggests that the presence (or absence) of women continues to be confined to studies that expressly set out to investigate the gendered dynamics of the campaign (Falk, 2010; Ross et al, 2013; Trimble, 2017).