Career development discourses and the framing of femininities

Abstract

As discourses around women representation around the world escalate, career development among women and media portrayal of women has attracted a lot of scholarly attention. Femininities are perceived as plural and dynamic, shaped by culture, social expectations, and individual perceptions rather than biological orientation. Limited research has explored how Kenyan Print Media specifically constructs and communicates these multiple femininities, thus creating a knowledge gap that this paper addressed. Further, the paper examined how discourses on career development among women frame femininities, focusing specifically on the Saturday Magazine, a lifestyle pullout of the Kenya’s Saturday Nation Newspaper. It was guided by the Framing Theory, which assumes that the way messages are represented in media influences how they are received, interpreted, and understood by audiences. The study employed qualitative research approach, which is particularly effective for exploring human perceptions, experiences, and social phenomena. The paper operates within the relativist and interpretive constructivist ontology and epistemology which acknowledge multiple realities. A content analysis was adopted in analyzing records from Saturday Magazines over three months (October-December 2020), a period when COVID-19 pandemic was reshaping women’s paid work and care responsibilities. Using the Framing Theory, the magazine headlines, body text and the accompanying visuals were coded both deductively and inductively. Five sub-themes emerged: selfless service, sexual autonomy, strategic networking, resilience and entrepreneurial reinvention. The paper reveals that the Saturday Magazine is a site where, meaning of womanhood in the contemporary Kenya is actively contested. Women are celebrated as being strong, hardworking and ambitious but it also validates their success mainly when it is tied to care, humility and relational duty. Women who assert sexual autonomy and financial independence are marked as deviant. The result is a hybrid of both empowerment and regulation of women’s behaviour. The paper recommends more reflexive gender reporting in Kenyan newsrooms, greater attention to structural barriers that shape women’s career, and wider representation of rural and lower-income women. The findings of this study will greatly benefit the women’s rights organizations, media organizations, government agencies and policy makers.