Journalistic Coverage of Women Candidates for Governor during the 2021 Campaigns in Mexico

In the Mexican elections of June 2021, political parties, for the first time, nominated a similar number of men and women candidates for governor of the states in competition. This article presents a quantitative content analysis of the journalistic coverage of the political campaigns of these elections with a comparison between men and women candidates. To do this, N = 774 news stories published in 17 newsgroups on the campaigns of Baja California, Campeche, Chihuahua, Guerrero, Querétaro, and Zacatecas were retrieved. The results show that women appeared less frequently than men as protagonists of news stories, their actions and statements are less remarkable than those of their male counterparts, and their gender is reiterated to a greater extent. It is concluded that despite gender parity in the number of candidates, women remained underrepresented in the journalistic information collected.