It took until 1979 for a woman to lead a major political party into a British general election. Since then, an uptick in the number of female leaders offers a chance to assess the way women party leaders are represented in newspaper coverage. Since Margaret Thatcher's first campaign as Conservative Party leader in 1979, there have been five campaigns in which women leaders have been the subject of press attention. This chapter will therefore focus on these five elections. For the first three, 1979, 1983, and 1987, Margaret Thatcher was the only female leader. In the 2015 and 2017 campaigns, multiple women leaders were visible in the news, including the Conservative's Theresa May (2017), the Green Party's Natalie Bennett (2015) and Caroline Lucas (2017), Plaid Cymru's Leanne Wood (2015 and 2017), and the Scottish National Party's (and first minister of Scotland) Nicola Sturgeon (2015 and 2017). Of these elections, three were contested by female prime ministers (1983, 1987, and 2017). While the 2010 election was contested by a female party leader (Caroline Lucas, Green Party), this campaign could not be included because she did not appear in the sampled newspaper coverage.

Given that party leaders have a much higher public profile than their female colleagues, it would be significant if this effects how they are reported on in gendered terms. There is some evidence suggesting that as women in Australia and Canada become increasingly prominent, news coverage about them is less likely to centre their gender identity (Trimble et al, 2019). There is very little longitudinal research on women leaders in the UK, although Williams (2020) compared coverage about Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May and found that, contrary to the evidence from other countries, news coverage of May was more explicitly gendered than news about Thatcher. The evidence we have so far, then, is scant and contradictory. As a first step in moving past this, this chapter will present a systematic analysis of the five elections in which women leaders were present in the coverage to assess whether there is significant change over time. The content analysis results will be presented in comparison with analysis of coverage about ordinary women politicians (non-leaders) in those campaigns, to determine if leaders are reported on in less gendered ways than their colleagues.