Proceedings of The 6th International Conference on Modern Approaches in Humanities and Social sciences
Year: 2023
DOI:
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The Way Women and Men Are Portrayed in the Newspapers in the State of Qatar during a Crisis: The COVID-19 Pandemic and Qatar-Gulf Crisis
Reem Al Kuwari
ABSTRACT:
For years, sociology research has focused on investigating the content of mass media news and its impact on various social issues, but recently there has been more focus on tackling gender issues in news content. There is a scarcity of research on how Arab women are portrayed in media where most research is Western-based. The significance of the current study is exploring how Arab women are depicted in their local media and evaluating gender representation in media articles during crises such as political issues (Qatar Gulf Crisis) and health issues (COVID-19) which gives another perspective on how female and male voices and arguments are shaped. The current research is based on a content analysis of Al Raya daily newspaper articles in Qatar dating from 2013 to 2021 using natural language processing using topic modelling, such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The main results indicate that men have been overrepresented compared to women’s representation over the years and across all topics. During health crises, the articles regularly showed a robust female prominence; during political crises, the articles tend to show a strong male prominence over the years analysed.
keywords: crises, gender, inequalities, media, middle east