Donne nell'ombra, bias linguistici di genere e copertura della stampa italiana su donne impegnate in politica

The political sphere has always privileged the male presence than the female. The marginalization of women in politics has led to questions about the reason for this gap. It is looking for answers also through the study of the images and representations disseminated by media. In this area it is gradually developing an interest in the role of language, that is seen as an important obstacle to the assumption of responsibility on the part of women who continue, through the use of specific linguistic devices, to be framed as passive subjects rather than as real protagonists of political life. Our work fits within this general interest exploring the use of some linguistic devices in the Italian journalistic communication by two different studies. The first one concerns 13 women ministers of three governments (2006-2008-2011) covered by 227 articles. The second one focuses on the president of Confindustria, the Confederation of Italian industrials, Emma Marcegaglia (elected on the 13/03/2008) and on the secretary of the Cgil, the leftist Italian Trade Union, Susanna Camusso (elected on the 03/11/2010), for a total of 160 articles. We applied a grid of content analysis on the entire article to detect the level of abstraction/concreteness of the language used to describe the women leaders along the lines of the Linguistic Category Model of Semin and Fiedler (1989) and the use of sexist/non-sexist language. The data collected were analyzed using the statistical packages SPSS and SPAD-T and showed, for both studies, higher levels of concreteness and sexism in language that obscure the presence and role of women crystallizing gender inequalities.