The media has an increasingly crucial position in creating, mediating and changing the images, attributes and stereotypes of gender and economic power in present global society. Media involvement in public and in corporate discourses has both politicized and shaped the engagements of various agents such as corporations, NGOs, etc. Mediatisation is also entangled in the present economization processes. Management and control of the public images has long been a part of any economic activity. Often referred to as "the fourth estate", the media is not an ‘outsider’ to the gendered and – through media - linguistically constructed society. The question of gender and power becomes especially pertinent when the financial media is scrutinized. How accounts of gender and economic power are constructed in the financial media is an important question for understanding the sexual/gender contract of the contemporary global and post-Fordist economies. The material we have used for the chapter focuses on the ways in which the images of women in leading managerial positions is mediated, controlled and manufactured as part of the global corporation narrative image in the financial media. More specifically, we have analysed the leading global financial weekly newspaper, The Economist and the ways in which gender as ‘personhood’ is constructed within its pages.

Our starting point is that the media is—as the economy—reproductive and gets reproduced in societal practices, processes, in its images and stereotypes. Media is also part of the post-Fordist ‘machinery’, recalibrating the corporate power and relocating the global interest anew. Therefore, it is crucial to analyse the media in its contemporary settings and analyse how those images materialize and are reworked through gendered displays in the economic media. Gender as a central analytical category is as important as ever before as inequalities, gendered social constructions, power relationships and gender stereotypes exist and become reconstituted anew in organizations, corporations, working life, and in private and public social domains.

At the core of the growing economization and financialization processes of the Western post-Fordist societies is the entanglement of power relations vested in the global, regional and national corporations and their established financial and material networks, including the business elites that extend beyond the usual boundaries adopted in classifications. While the global business elite is definitively not one unified group, even if often referred as unified because of the homosocial reproduction, it has increasingly become represented as the “personification” and “the face” for the corporate world, through the global financial media and also through the actions of the corporations.

The detailed empirical analysis of the material we have analysed has focused on how the ‘female manager as economic agency’ is constructed and enacted as a certain kind of ‘personhood’ in a global financial magazine. Our research questions are built around the idea of “stubborn and sticky gendered agency positions” that extend to the corporations’ managerial posts and relate critically to the gender contract theorisation. Through this metaphor of ‘stubborn and sticky gendered agency positions’ we want to put forward the idea of the gendered agencies that are active but simultaneously framed and articulated through specific attributes such as man, children, family, femininity, exception, etc. and thus locked into differing positions. While the constructionist notion of gender emphasises it as a moving and changing position and is constructed in a process, it also pushes gender and power theories to analyse the language used for those very positions and processes. The contested nature of the ‘institutionalization’ and stabilisation of gender can be given new light through the analysis of the gendered economy and new capitalism, enacted in corporations and mediated in the global economic media.