GENDER STEREOTYPING IN THE WORDS USED IN ESQUIRE AND COSMOPOLITAN ARTICLES: A CORPUS-DRIVEN STUDY

Some magazines have very gender-specific segmented market. A male magazine such as Esquire and a female magazine such as Cosmopolitan are very popular among many people. However, we need to keep in mind that somehow the words inside the articles can contain gender-stereotyping messages. Therefore, this thesis points toward comparing the words used in Esquire and Cosmopolitan. The data were taken from 30 Cosmopolitan and Esquire articles, both from the politics section. This paper implements the theory of vocabulary profile based on Nation (2001) in discovering gender stereotyping of males and females in both of the magazines. The lexical richness in the magazine shows that Esquire uses more casual and colloquial words compared to Cosmopolitan. On the other hand, Cosmopolitan uses more academic words compared to Esquire. Lastly, Cosmopolitan is discovered to use words that are more catered to its gender that is female, rather than Esquire. The lexical choice shows that Cosmopolitan uses more male words due to its text genre, in this case, politics. It somehow shows, that in political talks, even in female texts, male words are still more dominant to be used in the articles