‘Gender Disparities’ In Zimbabwe: A Discourse-Communication Analysis on the Female Journalists’ Columns: A Case of the Herald and Newsday

In today’s postmodern era, gender disparities arise from differences in socially constructed gender roles. The aim of this paper was in three folds. Firstly bring to fore the news articles by female columnists and evaluate whether they influence the continual growth of gender gaps in Zimbabwe. Secondly to, evaluate how female columnists close or widen the gender gap especially the representation of women by basically looking at the lexicogrammatical discourse used and lastly to analytically scrutinize the language used in these news stories in order to get whether female columnists have been able to strengthen the efforts made to fight for women space in the Zimbabwe. This research was conducted using Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as the theoretical framework. The findings revealed that female journalists have carried on with the norm of misrepresenting women in most of their articles which was usually done by male reporters. Moreover, In light of the findings gathered after analysing the news articles from the three female columnists, recommendations were made to come up with different ways of closing up gender gaps as far as a misrepresentation of women is concerned.