How Do Mothers and Fathers Talk About Parenting to Different Audiences?

Melody Sepahpour-Fard, Michael Quayle

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationWWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages2696-2706
Number of pages11
ISBN (Electronic)9781450390965
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 25 Apr 2022
Event31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022 - Virtual, Online, France
Duration: 25 Apr 202229 Apr 2022

Publication series

NameWWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

Conference

Conference31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityVirtual, Online
Period25/04/2229/04/22

Keywords

  • audience
  • computational social science
  • gender stereotypes
  • LDA topic modelling
  • natural language processing
  • parenting
  • Reddit
  • social identity performance
  • social psychology

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