Its in her eyes? A barometer for EU accession through female perceptions of role portrayals in advertising:a cross-cultural study of Ukraine and Turkey?

This article examines female response to gender role portrayals in advertising for Ukraine and Turkey. Being both new potential EU candidates, we argue that gender stereotype could also be used as a \u2018barometer\u2019 of progress and closure towards a more generally accepted EU behaviour against women. While their history remains different, both from a political and society values point of views, constraints are currently being faced that require convergence or justification of practices and understanding. Principal components analysis is employed over 290 questionnaires to identify the underlying dimensions. Results indicate overall similarities in perceptions, fragmentation within groups, but seem to provide divergence regarding thresholds.

Arlette Laguiller:does the mainstay of the French political far-left enjoy linguistic parity with her male counterparts?

While language use has been argued to reflect gender asymmetry, increasing parity has been evidenced in official settings (Holmes, 2000; Dister and Moreau, 2006). Our hypothesis is that the French national press has developed a norm of equal linguistic treatment of men and women. In a corpus of articles from Libération, Le Monde, and Le Figaro, we examine the treatment of Arlette Laguiller, the female leader of the French extreme-left 'Worker's Struggle' Party (Lutte Ouvrière), during the run-up to the 2007 presidential elections. How Laguiller is referred to and described in comparison with her male counterparts evidences no asymmetry. Breaches to parity are only found in the right-wing Figaro newspaper. The ideological distance between the newspaper and the candidate suggests that power struggles are a primary source of asymmetrical treatments. The discursive functions of such treatments can be understood through an investigation based on a portable corpus linguistics methodology for the measure of discrimination. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.