Dr Fiona McKay
Media and Communication Lecturer at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. Her interests focus on the intersections of journalism, gender and politics, with a focus on the representation and experiences of women journalists and politicians in the Scottish context.
Dr Melody House
Teaching Associate at the University of Strathclyde. Her research centres questions of representation, feminism and violence. Her work is published in Feminist Media Studies, Feminist Theory, Journal of Gender-Based Violence, European Journal of Cultural Studies and Journalism.
Scottish Election 2026
Section 2: News, media and journalism
- News consumption in Scotland (Dr Camila Montalverne)
- TikTok’s For You Page recommendations during the Scottish Parliament election (Dr Dayei Oh, Dr Chamil Rathnayake)
- From participation to consumption? Youth engagement and “parasocial media” (Dr James Dennis)
- The battle for trust in the Holyrood election (Prof Catherine Happer, Dr James Morrison, Dr Lluis de Nadal)
- Polls over policy in UK-wide TV news coverage of Elections (Dr Maxwell Modell, Dr Keighley Perkins, Prof Stephen Cushion)
- Legacy news coverage of the election – Leaders debate and press coverage (Dr Steven Harkins)
- All right, own up, who let the woman in? (Dr Fiona McKay, Dr Melody House)
- Negotiations of the constitutional question (Dr Maike Dinger)
“All right, own up, who let the woman in?” This was what one commentator asked, observing the dominance of men in the line-up of a Channel 4 Scottish Leaders Debate.
A tongue-in-cheek comment, it drew attention to the glaring lack of gender diversity at the top of Scottish politics in the 2026 election. It also chimed with the results: the proportion of women elected to the new Scottish parliament is 43%, down 2% from the previous election cycle. In the aftermath, the media reported that “fears over women’s representation [had been] realised” with the figures marking a “‘reversal’ of 100 years of progress” after an historic high point in 2021.
Yet the Scottish media have been far from blameless, with preliminary figures showing a notable lack of coverage of women in the news media. In data prepared for Pass the Mic, a forthcoming project monitoring Scottish news over the election period, it was found that men dominated election coverage, making up 74% of all people mentioned. Men also dominated coverage which focused on candidates, making up 79% of those who appeared. It was already the case that the number of women standing as candidates was down. However, the allocation of media coverage was lower than this even reduced proportion.
Nonetheless, there were some gains for women’s representation. Four women of colour have been elected, including Scotland’s first trans woman MSP, Iris Duane. This is double the amount elected to Holyrood in 2021, which was record-breaking at the time. There was some prominent coverage of Duane and fellow Green winner Q Manivannan as the first trans MSPs to be elected. Yet this was met with much less fanfare than when Kaukab Stewart and Pam Gosal took their seats.
When women candidates appeared in the media, stories focused on their personal comments (such as Kate Nevens’ proposal to abolish Scotland’s prisons) or on surprising or historic wins, such as the Greens’ first ever constituency seats won by Lorna Slater and Holly Bruce, or the first SNP MSP in Shetland for 27 years, Hannah Mary Goodlad. These findings differed from previous studies for Pass the Mic on the last Scottish Parliamentary Election (2021) and the General Election (2024), which found that when women appeared in the media, the story often centred on their gender (and in the few instances of women of colour candidates, their race).
When gender was an element of discussion in the media, coverage tended to focus on key political debates, such as the Gender Recognition Bill. Optimistically, this may point to a ‘normalisation’ of women in politics, away from their novelty status – how many women in politics have been framed in the past. However, the lack of visibility of women across the board may also point to more equal representation of women becoming less of a priority for the media.
Of course, this is partly due to the media’s overemphasis on party leaders, making up 40% of all people in the news during the monitoring period, and 51% of all politicians. The impact of this ‘presidentialisation’ of politics is clear when looking back to the 2021 election coverage. With Nicola Sturgeon serving as the First Minister at the time, women made up 34% of all party leaders in the news. This dropped to 6% this election period.
Past results, therefore, may have given the impression that the media increasingly embraces diversity, but it actually falls short when women are not in top positions. With only one woman leader (Gillian Mackay, co-leader of the Greens) Scotland’s claimed place at the vanguard in championing women in politics – at one point with three women leaders, including the First Minister – may have been premature .
Indeed, this did not go unnoticed by the Scottish media. In the first television debate on BBC One Scotland, host Stephen Jardine declared that it was “all men… this time” as Green co-leader Ross Greer occupied the podium for his party. This was consistent with coverage overall. Although the Scottish Green party have a split leadership, Greer was the one who dominated coverage for the party’s leaders with a 60% share of mentions compared to Mackay’s 40%.
With Mackay, there was also some evidence of the stereotypical trope of the ‘double-bind’ when she appeared in the Channel 4 debate. Here, she was simultaneously praised and criticised for staying quiet, rather than getting involved in the “bun fight” with the other leaders. The double-bind, popularised by American Professor of communication Kathleen Hall Jamieson, is a concept associated with women in male-dominated realms like politics. It frames women in a kind of “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” situation, having to fulfil competing expectations of acting like a “woman” at the same time as fulfilling the masculinised expectations of a role. This is observed in various iterations where a man may be framed as “authoritative”, while a woman is a “bitch” or, alternatively, “too soft”.
It remains to be seen, then, if the media will give more equal coverage or fall back into problematic tropes if Scotland has more women in leadership roles, but current trends are not promising.
