TY - GEN
T1 - How Do Mothers and Fathers Talk About Parenting to Different Audiences?
AU - Sepahpour-Fard, Melody
AU - Quayle, Michael
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Owner/Author.
PY - 2022/4/25
Y1 - 2022/4/25
N2 - While major strides have been made towards gender equality in public life, serious inequality remains in the domestic sphere, especially around parenting. The present study analyses discussions about parenting on Reddit (i.e., a content aggregation website) to explore audience effects and gender stereotypes. It suggests a novel method to study topical variation in individuals' language when interacting with different audiences. Comments posted in 2020 were collected from three parenting subreddits (i.e., topical communities), described as being for fathers (r/Daddit), mothers (r/Mommit), and all parents (r/Parenting). Users posting on r/Parenting and r/Daddit or on r/Parenting and r/Mommit were assumed to identify as fathers or mothers, respectively, allowing gender comparison. Users' comments on r/Parenting (to a mixed-gender audience) were compared with their comments to single-gender audiences on r/Daddit or r/Mommit using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling. Results show that the most discussed topic among parents is about education and family advice, a topic mainly discussed in the mixed-gender subreddit and more by fathers than mothers. The topic model also indicates that, when it comes to the basic needs of children (sleep, food, and medical care), mothers seem to be more concerned regardless of the audience. In contrast, topics such as birth and pregnancy announcements and physical appearance are more discussed by fathers in the father-centric subreddit. Overall, findings seem to show that mothers are generally more concerned about the practical sides of parenting while fathers' expressed concerns are more contextual: with other fathers, there seems to be a desire to show their fatherhood and be recognized for it while they discuss education with mothers. These results demonstrate that concerns expressed by parents on Reddit are context-sensitive but also consistent with gender stereotypes, potentially reflecting a persistent gendered and unequal division of labour in parenting.
AB - While major strides have been made towards gender equality in public life, serious inequality remains in the domestic sphere, especially around parenting. The present study analyses discussions about parenting on Reddit (i.e., a content aggregation website) to explore audience effects and gender stereotypes. It suggests a novel method to study topical variation in individuals' language when interacting with different audiences. Comments posted in 2020 were collected from three parenting subreddits (i.e., topical communities), described as being for fathers (r/Daddit), mothers (r/Mommit), and all parents (r/Parenting). Users posting on r/Parenting and r/Daddit or on r/Parenting and r/Mommit were assumed to identify as fathers or mothers, respectively, allowing gender comparison. Users' comments on r/Parenting (to a mixed-gender audience) were compared with their comments to single-gender audiences on r/Daddit or r/Mommit using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling. Results show that the most discussed topic among parents is about education and family advice, a topic mainly discussed in the mixed-gender subreddit and more by fathers than mothers. The topic model also indicates that, when it comes to the basic needs of children (sleep, food, and medical care), mothers seem to be more concerned regardless of the audience. In contrast, topics such as birth and pregnancy announcements and physical appearance are more discussed by fathers in the father-centric subreddit. Overall, findings seem to show that mothers are generally more concerned about the practical sides of parenting while fathers' expressed concerns are more contextual: with other fathers, there seems to be a desire to show their fatherhood and be recognized for it while they discuss education with mothers. These results demonstrate that concerns expressed by parents on Reddit are context-sensitive but also consistent with gender stereotypes, potentially reflecting a persistent gendered and unequal division of labour in parenting.
KW - audience
KW - computational social science
KW - gender stereotypes
KW - LDA topic modelling
KW - natural language processing
KW - parenting
KW - Reddit
KW - social identity performance
KW - social psychology
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85129823143&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3485447.3512138
DO - 10.1145/3485447.3512138
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85129823143
T3 - WWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
SP - 2696
EP - 2706
BT - WWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022
Y2 - 25 April 2022 through 29 April 2022
ER -