Gender Representation in News Images: A Study of Newspapers in Bangladesh

Authors/ Publisher: Beauty Mondol

Abstract:

News images are a powerful part of journalism. It makes stories more emotional, trustworthy and important. Media can play an important role in eradicating gender inequality by publishing positive news images of all genders. But there is a tendency to prioritize male dominance and marginalize women and people of other genders in news images. The research aims to find out how men and women are represented in news images in Bangladeshi newspapers and to explore the extent and nature of visual gender bias in media representation. The study used quantitative and qualitative content analysis methods to analyze the news images. Three national dailies, Prothom Alo, Ittefaq and Samakal were selected for the study through purposive sampling. The researcher collected 664 images from five news beats as follows: politics, economy, education, sports and entertainment from January 1 to January 7, 2025. Representation theory, feminist theory and semiology were used as theoretical frameworks for the study. The findings showed that 57.98% of news images represented exclusively men, 21.08% represented exclusively women and 20.93% featured both men and women. Men dominated coverage of political (17.17%), economy (15.06%) and sports (15.96%) where women are featured more in entertainment beats (10.54%). Men were shown in leadership roles, formal attire and serious expressions while women were more often shown smiling, dressed casually and in passive or decorative roles. Additionally, women’s images were overrepresented in education beat. The study concludes that visual content in newspapers still reflects traditional gender stereotypes and reinforces existing social power imbalance.

Keywords: Media representation, visual stereotypes, news images, Bangladeshi newspapers, gender bias, feminist analysis