The Visibility Gap: What New Research Reveals About Candidates, Media, & Elections
By Elect Her
Women candidates work harder for less amplification!
We knew it but now the University of Exeter has spotlighted a sobering pattern in recent UK general elections. Women tweet more yet receive fewer retweets than men, and even when they make the news, that exposure translates less effectively into votes.
The findings, captured in a new research volume on media and British elections from 2015 to 2019, help explain why women still face a “gender penalty” despite running strong campaigns and winning seats.
This work mirrors our own conversations - we have spent years hearing the experiences of women, understanding what stands in the way of their advancement in our democracy.
We’ve created a roadmap for change, with 48 distinct levers that need to be pulled to Fix the System to make our democracy fit for the 21st Century!
What the study examined...
The research is compiled in the Media and the British General Elections of 2015–2019, edited by Daniel Stevens, Susan Banducci, László Horváth, and Ekaterina Kolpinskaya. It brings together multiple studies that combine large-scale analysis of print, television, and social media with election data and candidate characteristics. Much of the work leverages the British Election Longitudinal News Study (BELNS) - it tracks topics, tone, and candidate coverage across three election cycles.
One part focuses in on the 2019 general election, matching Twitter activity from over 1,500 candidates (920 men and 587 women) with coverage from 64 news outlets. That integration of social media, traditional media, and the electoral results allowed researchers to see not just who gets attention, but how that attention travels and whether it helps candidates convert visibility into votes.
The key findings
Women tweet more—but are amplified less.
Women candidates posted more on social media than men in 2019, yet their messages were retweeted less often. The platform-level “megaphone effect” isn’t neutral; it appears systematically dampened for women even when they’re more active
Media coverage helps men more.
Getting covered still matters, but the payoff from news coverage is weaker for women than for men. In other words, when a woman candidate makes the news, it’s less likely to boost her electoral fortunes to the same extent as for a man.
That helps explain the persistent perception that women “must be twice as good to get half as far.”
Traditional media still gatekeep the agenda.
Despite the rise of social platforms, newspapers continue to set the tone and topics that spill over into TV - social media can route around gatekeepers, but legacy media still shape what is salient.
Leader coverage moves votes more than issue coverage.
The research finds leader-focused coverage matters more for vote intention than stories about issues—evidence of a continuing “presidentialisation” of UK elections. That tilt toward personalities can entrench biases about who “looks” like a leader.
Seat competitiveness interacts with tone.
Across the 2015, 2017, and 2019 elections, competitive constituencies were associated with more positive media coverage. Safe seats saw men receive more positive tone than women; in competitive seats, women saw somewhat more favourable coverage, suggesting intensity doesn’t necessarily make coverage go negative for women—but the overall pattern still favours men in safer contexts.
Why these results matter
If women must accumulate more experience, spend more time, and invest more energy to earn the same electoral outcomes, the cost of participation is higher for them at every step.
That cost isn’t just personal—it’s systemic.
It filters who decides to run, which voices are heard, and what policy priorities make it to the top of the national agenda.
The work underscores that the bottlenecks are structural: amplification dynamics on social platforms, editorial choices in legacy media, and the leader-centric framing of campaigns combine to ration visibility in ways that disadvantage women.
What could “fixes” look like?
Practical, system-level changes that can help:
Data driven equality - means newsrooms measuring and adjusting coverage, platforms stress-testing algorithms for bias, and parties engineering campaign environments that don’t make women pay a “visibility tax.” The good news is we now have clearer maps of where the barriers are.
The next step is to move them.
In Newsrooms:
Audit source lists, story mix, and tone by gender. If newspapers shape TV and public salience, editors can monitor and correct imbalances in who appears, how often, and in what contexts.
On platforms:
Transparency on political content performance. Routine, disaggregated reporting (by candidate gender) would reveal whether algorithms consistently down-rank women’s content—even when engagement inputs are similar.
Fairness reviews for recommendation systems. Regular bias testing can identify patterns such as lower retweet traction for women’s posts and guide product tweaks to mitigate them.
For parties and campaigners:
Invest in candidate amplification infrastructures. Coordinated “boost networks” and media training can help counter the weaker conversion of coverage into votes for women identified by the research.
Plan for leader-centric media logics. If leader coverage matters most, parties should systematically create leadership-stage moments for women—shadow roles, policy launches, and debates—so visibility isn’t monopolised by a few familiar faces.
Don’t make women pay a “visibility tax.”
Next Steps…
The research doesn’t argue that women can’t succeed—clearly, many do. Rather, it shows that success often costs them more: more tweets for fewer retweets; more appearances for less electoral lift; more vigilance in navigating leader-focused, legacy-media-driven agendas.
None of this is inevitable. It’s the product of institutional choices, editorial norms, and platform designs. When those reform, the playing field changes too.
If we want elections that reflect the country as it is—its talent, experience, and perspectives—we need to fix the systems that ration visibility.
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