Constructing the “Career Woman” in British Newspapers: A Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis

ABSTRACT

This article examines how the term “career woman” organized newspaper accounts of women’s work in Britain between 1985 and 2020. It draws on 283 articles from The Guardian, The Times, and the Daily Mail, using corpus‐informed sampling and Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis. The analysis shows how the label repeatedly moved discussion of women’s professional lives beyond the workplace through three recurring patterns. Lifestyle coverage ties professional identity to appearance, diet, and bodily self‐management. Reporting on workplace inequality often explains unequal pay and progression through women’s confidence, ambition, and domestic decisions. Accounts of fertility and motherhood frame career commitment through reproductive delay and loss. Across these contexts, “career woman” works as a gendered category of judgment, making women’s authority accountable to expectations of femininity, care, and reproductive timing. The study contributes to gender, work, and organization research by showing how the label “career woman” connects professional ambition and organizational legitimacy with bodily discipline, care, and reproductive timing in British newspaper discourse.