Spotlighted but with gender bias: Underrepresentation and paradoxical representation of frontline women health workers in Chinese social media during COVID-19

Abstract

Despite that women constitute the major force in the frontline health sector during COVID-19, representation and biased representation of women health workers still prevail. This study applied Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling on Weibo posts (N = 199,110) containing the keyword, “援鄂医疗队” (i.e., “aiding-Hubei medical team” where Hubei is the province that Wuhan is in). Posts were published during the first stage of COVID-19 (January 22, 2020 to June 30, 2020). Results revealed that frontline health workers were spotlighted on Weibo as serving the “nation,” saving the “patients,” and fulfilling family roles, indicating a home-country-isomorphism ideology. According to the 13 topics found in this online corpus, posts discussing health workers in a genderless collective lens tended to emphasize their professional roles; but when the woman identity of health workers became evident, posts tended to emphasize their family roles. Moreover, we observed the militarization of language that reinforced patriarchal masculinity. Corporates’ and male celebrities’ wave-riding and hashtag-jumping/hijacking – with posts celebrating their charitable activities toward COVID-19 medical teams – further deprived women health workers of their voices and visibility. Social bots, notably, participated in this message propagation process. Implications of findings are discussed.