‘Girls! There’s Still Time to Earn a Man-Size Wage’: Representing gender discrimination legislation in the 1970s in UK print media.

This article examines how UK newspapers and women’s magazines represented the Equal Pay Act 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975 in the years of their introduction, passage and enactment. It explores the tone and framing of coverage across publications with differing political perspectives, contrasting male-edited national newspapers with women’s magazines. It demonstrates how coverage not only reflected the ideological leanings of different newspapers of the period but also reflected awareness of different political approaches to equality and what that might mean. The article examines whether the Acts’ greatest significance lay in their legal provisions or in the discourse they provoked on areas of entrenched sex discrimination.