Kvinnor gillar flärd, män är som de är : En studie om hur män och kvinnor skildras i samhällsmagasinen Filter och Fokus

Sammanfattning: Abstract Authors: Mikaela Magnusson & Malin Stenström Title: Jolly women and ugly men - a study of the way men and women are portrayed in the magazines Filter and Fokus Level: BA Thesis in Journalism Location: Linnaeus University Language: Swedish Number of pages: 78   Everyday we're exposed to gender roles. It can take the form of our immediate family, our classmates, the books we read, the teve series we watch or the magazines we read. Everyday the world around us shape the way we think of men and women and how they're supposed to be. As a part of either (or neither) of those genders we are all shaped into the mold that society has set for us. The media is one of the largest contributors to this socialization and therefore we felt it necessary to study two, critically acclaimed, media outlets and shed some light on their portrayals of gender.   We chose to study Filter and Fokus, two social magazines with close to a corresponding amount male as female readers and a reputation of being modern and free of prejudice. Since these magazines are considered forerunners in the race towards equality we found it interesting to analyze just how good they really are and which kinds of messages they supply.   In this study we used both a quantitative method and a qualitative method. The quantitative method consisted of a content analysis, which results we then based the themes for the qualitative discourse analysis upon. In the content analysis we read 52 articles and took note of the way the person was described in terms of personality, looks, emotional capacity, success etcetera. During this analysis we detected some trends that we analyzed more in depth in the discourse analysis.   Our study show that the preconception that Filter and Fokus are two relatively gender neutral and prejudice free magazines is true. Our results verify that many of their portrayals are in fact equal and that they succeed in presenting proper journalistic content, in terms of moral as well as news worth. Nobody's perfect though and we did find that the magazines are lacking both in terms of representation (there's a clear majority of male portraits) and description. Both magazines have a couple of recurring choices of words and portrayals that repeat and confirm existing gender roles. Generally the men are described as more independent, serious and “natural” where's the women are more humble, obedient and have their physical appearance being an ever-present cause for identification and explanation. These tendencies contribute to the current gender system and help establishing norms for how we're supposed to live our lives.   In conclusion our study shows that both magazines are, in general, unbiased and gender neutral but they do have a number of repetitive stereotypic tendencies, which contradicts the journalistic responsibilities.