“The worst thing about the Brexit debate is that I have to see Boris Johnson’s face in the newspaper every day,” a family member joked to me last week. The comment evoked a wider problem in both the political and media spheres since the referendum on Britain’s future relationship with the EU was announced earlier this year. As Rachel Shabi and Josiah Mortimer have recently pointed out, the Brexit debate has been significantly male-dominated, from the framing of the debate as a ‘Cameron vs Johnson’ clash (pick which former Etonian white man will decide your future) to the disproportionately ‘pale and male’ nature of much media commentary on the issue, which has replicated in microcosm the widely-documented imbalances of representation in the British media.
This is not only a ‘politics of representation’ issue, but impacts on a wider gender divide that manifests amongst would-be voters as a whole. Josiah Mortimer of the Electoral Reform Society recently pointed to the striking gender gap in BMG polling on how well-informed British people feel about the referendum. The figures are pretty paltry across the board, with only 12 per cent of the public claiming they feel ‘well-informed’ and only four per cent ‘very well informed’. Mortimer highlights that the gender gap within this is a cause for alarm: men are twice as likely to feel well-informed compared to women (at 21 per cent versus 10 per cent of women), and argues that this “suggests the campaigns – and the media coverage of those campaigns – aren’t reaching out of the Westminster bubble or targetting groups outside of middle-aged to elderly men”.
This gender imbalance is part of a wider chasm in levels of engagement with the Brexit debate – the older and richer you are, the more well-informed you are likely to feel – indicating a wider alienation of more marginalised groups from the whole debate. This will almost certainly affect the outcome of the referendum itself, as the more well-informed a person perceives themselves to be, the more likely they are to vote.
