Gender bias in magazines oriented to men and women: a computational approach

• Main Authors: Kozlowski, Diego, Lozano, Gabriela, Felcher, Carla M, Gonzalez, Fernando, Altszyler, Edgar
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 24-11-2020
• Subjects: Computer Science - Computation and Language; Computer Science - Computers and Society
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2011.12096

Feminist Media Studies (2022) Cultural products are a source to acquire individual values and behaviours.
Therefore, the differences in the content of the magazines aimed specifically
at women or men are a means to create and reproduce gender stereotypes. In this
study, we compare the content of a women-oriented magazine with that of a
men-oriented one, both produced by the same editorial group, over a decade
(2008-2018). With Topic Modelling techniques we identify the main themes
discussed in the magazines and quantify how much the presence of these topics
differs between magazines over time. Then, we performed a word-frequency
analysis to validate this methodology and extend the analysis to other subjects
that did not emerge automatically. Our results show that the frequency of
appearance of the topics Family, Business and Women as sex objects, present an
initial bias that tends to disappear over time. Conversely, in Fashion and
Science topics, the initial differences between both magazines are maintained.
Besides, we show that in 2012, the content associated with horoscope increased
in the women-oriented magazine, generating a new gap that remained open over
time. Also, we show a strong increase in the use of words associated with
feminism since 2015 and specifically the word abortion in 2018. Overall, these
computational tools allowed us to analyse more than 24,000 articles. Up to our
knowledge, this is the first study to compare magazines in such a large
dataset, a task that would have been prohibitive using manual content analysis
methodologies.