The Discourse of Women's Careers: Media Representation (on the Basis of Forbes Magazine)

This study is devoted to the media representation of women’s careers in business magazine Forbes. There are the most common models of life trajectory among Russian women: orientation on domestic work or private sphere; orientation on career or public sphere. Also, women try to use work-life balance concept, combining professional employment and household chores. These strategies are supported by gender contracts, of which "working mother" is the most common. Only few women reach leadership positions due to the gender bias in work evaluation. And business is always concerned as male sphere, where female cannot work. Mass media plays a crucial role in the selection of career success patterns, in the interpretation of factors leading to success and in the production of meanings that legitimize that success. Media representations are usually performed through gender stereotypes, which divide people by gender and endow them with certain characteristics. In other words, mass media propagates certain expectations associated with gender. Media discourses and images maintain the idea that women should perform masculine personality characteristics and show masculine behavior while suppressing feminine traits. Woman have to follow certain criteria to perform as careerist seeking to be better than men. Consequently, the representations shown in the media in professional and family discourses create certain barriers for women to building a career (ideas about opportunities, participants, restrictions). The aim of the work is to analyze Forbes publications to describe the criteria represented by the media for evaluating women's careers success. The broader focus of my research is the media representation of the success criteria for evaluating women's careers in Forbes magazine. The study was conducted in a qualitative design applying discourse analysis of 12 publications of the Forbes magazine. In this paper, the author tries to answer the following questions: Is the women's success evaluated according to the male model? What is the price of women's success? Does the problem of life and work balance concern both sexes equally? How do the media assess the problem of underrepresentation of women? Does professionalism have a feminine dimension? Despite the gender-liberal agenda, Forbes shows the inaccessibility of business for women. To achieve career success, they must make sacrifices in the form of family and femininity, copying the male style of behavior. Indeed, the success of businesswomen is evaluated according to the male model, and professionalism is not a gender-neutral category, but is associated with masculinity.