The next speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is our host Martina Edr Novotná, who continues our focus on gender. Gender stereotypes create barriers for women in politics; they also align such women with issues that are perceived to be female-coded, and thereby limit their ability to engage in other topics. But evidence on such gendering remains inconsistent, as party affiliation and other aspects also intersect with such patterns.
This study, then, examined gender issue ownership on Facebook across some 18 countries in the DigiWorld research network. It focussed on national election campaigns between 2021 and 2025, for ten European and eight non-European countries, and examined posts by party leaders in the 28 days before each election day.
It begins with the assumption that several topics (including health, families, social issues, etc.) tend to be female-owned, while others are male-owned or neutral. Women candidates tended to emphasise female-owned issues more strongly than men, though they also addressed male-owned issues more than men, while men addressed neutral issues more often.
Indeed, women and men on the left emphasised female-owned issues more strongly than their right-wing counterparts, so party membership may be more important here. Overall gender gaps in each national society also intersect with this, though; some countries with relatively small gender gaps also showed limited differences between male and female candidates.
