Investigating the Role of Discourse Structures in Gender Representation in Los Angeles Times and Tehran Times

Abstract

This study tried to investigate “gender representation” in two English newspapers of Los Angeles Times and Tehran Times focusing on the type of employed discourse strategies. For this to achieve, 7 articles were selected from each newspaper to be investigated using Van Dijk’s (2000) “socio-cognitive model” of text analysis. 286 discourse strategies were used in 7 articles of Los Angeles Times while it was just 149 for Tehran Times articles; it was demonstrated that the male-female representation is significantly different in Los Angeles Times compared with Tehran Times; genders were represented differently through employing diverse discourse strategies in these two newspapers. Los Angeles Times followed a nearly balanced way in depicting genders in terms of discourse strategies (i.e., the discourse strategies used for females are not significantly different from those which were used for males). On the contrary, Tehran Times was shown to represent two genders differently through employing different discourse strategies; hence, it had a sexist attitude for representing both genders.