Bein a target of sexism has it’s consequences: emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and psychological. It’s not just being in gender(родова, не полова) non – traditional occupations that causes this kind of issues, but the attitudes of an individual’s coworkers. It can be uncomfortable to be in a situation where others are skeptical of our qualifications or expect us to perform poorly. It’s no surprise that people tend to erform poorly in their work place when their coworkers doubt their abilities while applying negative stereotypes on them. While being a target of sexism, people manifest physiological reactions such as; increased heart rate, systolic blood pressure, cardiac contractile force and other visible reactions such as skin rash.
We have seen that the media reinforce and strenghten gender stereotypes, also leading directly to sexism. Eventhough there is clear evidence that media also promote sexism. Blatant misogyny is all to common in the words of performers and media commentators and in the depictions of women in television, film, music and other media outlets. One of the overlooked venue for sexism in the media are the search engines of the internet, search results that open the top results often reflect sexism and racism. For e.g. when searching for the best women athletes, the results differ from “Gergeous women athletes” to “ Sexiest women athletes”, creating a prejudice.
One could easily argue that sexism is “blooming” in the media when talking about female political figures. There are tons of examples how television or radio commentators use rude or even nasty words when describing the appearance rather then the accomplishments of women in the political world. During the 2016 US presidental race, commentators mocked Hilary Clinton both for not smiling or for smiling too much. Even former First Lady of the US Michelle Obama was a constant target of racist and sexist remarks while being in the White House. North Macedonia is not immune to that kind of comments as well, for e.g. after becoming the Deputy Prime Minister of the Government and Minister of Defense, Radmila Sekerinska was being critized that a woman shouldn’t hold such a high position in the defense field, the media and social media tried to showcase her as incompetent based just on her gender. Take for e.g. the Special Prosecutor’s Office, which consists of Katica Janeva, Fatime Fetai and Lence Ristovska, who were constantly “dragged” in the media about their physical appereance or what and where they would shop for their clothing. Social media is also not a female friendly envoirment for regular women as well, for instance if a woman states her political opinion on Facebook or Twitter, she also finds herself being mocked for her appereance thus trying to deleditimize her opinion publicly.
Media coverage of female politicians often uses sexist language, and tends to focus more on family roles, appearance, and perceived “women’s political issues” when covering female politicians. Women routinely face questions that male candidates nearly never encounter, like being asked to smile or to answer questions about work-life balance. Female politicians have been stereotyped in the media as “ice queens” or “grandmas,” and have been historically categorized into one of four roles: seductress, mother, pet, or battle-ax.[1] So subtle sexism in political coverage can have a real impact on candidates.[2]
Meral Musli Tajroska – a psychologist, an expert on violent extremism and radicalism and a woman rights activist
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This project was funded in part through a U.S. Embassy grant. The opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed herein are those of the implementers/authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Government.
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