Is artificial intelligence empowering or posing risks to feminism and women’s rights? Evidence from global press coverage

Artificial intelligence has become a growing focus of feminist media attention, particularly in relation to women’s empowerment, gendered harm, and governance. This study examines how global newspapers construct artificial intelligence within feminism and women’s rights discourse, with particular attention to how evaluative emphasis shifts across different textual levels of news discourse. Drawing on framing theory and feminist critiques of socio-technical power, the analysis examines 682 English language newspaper articles retrieved from Nexis Uni. Using theoretically grounded indices of empowerment and risk, the multi level framing analysis shows that headlines tend to polarize artificial intelligence into singular evaluative frames of empowerment or risk, reflecting attention driven news logics. Hleads, which combine the headline with the lead paragraph, reduce the contrast between empowerment and risk framings, while body texts increasingly articulate empowerment more clearly through extended narrative context. Building on this stratified pattern, thematic modeling demonstrates that empowerment is articulated through access, voice, rights awareness, and institutional inclusion, whereas risk is framed through gendered harm, algorithmic bias, surveillance, and institutional power. Journalism thus operates as a key site where feminist meanings of artificial intelligence are strategically intensified at entry and negotiated through narrative depth.