“Serial rorters or mere mortals?” Gendered mediation in comments to newspapers about how male and femalegovernment leaders handle money

Abstract This article examines the acceptability of female government leaders to members of the public through online reader comments to newspapers, focusing on the differing appraisal of male and female leaders’ relationship to money/finance. We examined 20,000 reader comments to two national Australian newspapers about 13 male and 14 female government leaders between 2013 and 2018, employing corpus-assisted discourse analysis. Dissatisfaction with handling of money was significantly more frequent for female leaders than male, including topoi of misuse/abuse of government funds, leaders’ sense of entitlement and disapproval of the size of female government leaders’ salaries. Linguistic appraisal included intensification, exaggeration and supposition supported by strategies to strengthen and authorise claims, which was markedly more frequent for females. Conversely, money-related comments about males demonstrated mitigation of alleged wrongdoings. Results support higher negative judgement of female leaders and strong engagement by commenters in the topos of fiscal dishonesty presented by mainstream media.