The Representation of Women in Arab Media: Evidence From Jordan’s News Agency (PETRA) in 2017

Abstract

Arab women have recently made significant achievements in the fields of science and education in addition to contributing to political, social, and economic aspects. Despite so, they still face different obstacles and have limited opportunities to take leading positions in the Arab community. This study uses a corpus of 1329 articles (562,501 words) published by Jordan News Agency (PETRA) to examine how women are defined and constructed in 2017. Carrying out a Critical Discourse Analysis qualitative analysis and Corpus Linguistic quantitative analysis, the researcher found that although Jordan is making progress with regard to women’s rights, women are still seen as a weak part in the society. The article concludes that representing women as dominated party helps to perpetuate negative stereotypes.