Gender Imbalance in the Media: Time Lag or Hysteresis?—French Newspapers, Gender Parity Shocks, and the Long and Winding Road to the Demasculinization of Political Reporting (1990–2020)

A large corpus of scientific literature details how the media generates an imbalance in their portrayal of society and thus contributes to the reproduction of extant power structures, particularly gender. However, there has been scant attention paid to understanding how the media adapt to changes in the social environment, especially with power structures modified by exogenous shocks such as new laws requiring gender parity in politics. This study examines how such shocks affected gender imbalance in the coverage of politics in France between 1990 and 2020. It highlights the shortcomings of an overly linear approach to the time lag effect in understanding the parameters and substance of gender imbalance in political news and advocates instead for utilizing the concept of gender imbalance hysteresis to understand why media stories do not demasculinize as quickly as the gender composition of Parliament.