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34 MBiz | may 2016 34 MBiz | may 2016 may 2016 may T he lessons of history help us avoid repeating it. That's one reason I.H. Asper School of Business assistant professor Sean Buchanan is committed to filling a surprisingly large void in academic research into the 2008 global financial crisis. It's fertile ground, providing Buchanan and his research partners with several lines of inquiry, one of which took an unexpected turn into the issue of gender inequity as they analyzed media data related to consumer debt. "Male and female borrowers were being spoken about differently," Buchanan says. "The male-female distinction in how the media described them or discussed them was different, so we delved into that a little further." The data was taken from U.S. print media with the largest national circulations — the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post — over six years from September 2005 to August 2011. In the sample of 2,623 articles, the researchers found that men tended to be portrayed as savvy, responsible consumers who used credit to buy necessities for their families, and then took assertive action to discharge debt. Women, on the other hand, tended to be characterized as less savvy, irresponsible, inclined to frivolous spending and helpless in the face of debt. The resulting paper, Categorizing capability: Consumer debt and the discursive reproduction of gender inequality, co-authored by Buchanan, Trish Ruebottom (Brock University), and Suhaib Riaz (University of Massachusetts, Boston) is currently under review. However, Buchanan says the findings have significant social implications. "One of the big questions in the social sciences is, 'How do institutions like gender inequality get reinforced?' Especially when the majority of the population would view them as needing to change." Buchanan says part of the answer lies in how sources such as the mainstream media characterize men and women, and in the language reporters use to describe them. "The media tended to view men as what we call strongly agentic and women as weakly agentic, so men were talked about as being assertive; they were negotiating complex decisions; they were spoken about as having more agency than women," he says. "You could make a case that it's just a difference in how men and women present themselves — men just have a tendency to present themselves as more responsible and savvy than women do, and that's just based on societal factors. "But we also we took away the specific quotes that males and females had in the data and just looked at the words that the media was using to describe men and women, and the journalists themselves would tend to use different language for men and women." Buchanan says it's important to highlight the issue, in part because portraying women as less capable of making sound financial decisions contributes to a power imbalance in the financial realm. "The evidence shows that men and women don't differ in terms of the loads of debt they carry and the amount that they default on their loans. In fact, the evidence suggests that women are more responsible than men in that regard," he says. "But the media presentation suggests the opposite, and that gives men, I think, a greater power." Buchanan earned his Bachelor of Arts (Advanced), Bachelor of Commerce (Honours) and Master of Science in Business Administration as a University of Manitoba and Asper School of Business student from 1999 until 2010. He completed his PhD at York University before returning as a faculty member. This term, he's teaching an undergraduate course, Business and Society, which touches on gender inequality and some of the other social and environmental issues his wide-ranging research projects explore. ■ I.H. ASPER SCHOOL OF BUSINESS I.H. Asper School of Business assistant professor of Business Administration Sean Buchanan. Photo by Darcy Finley MEDIA & MONEY Gender bias in matters of life and debt By Pat St. Germain "One of the big questions in the social sciences is, 'How do institutions like gender inequality get reinforced?' Especially when the majority of the population would view them as needing to change."

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