5 - Sex and Gender

Summary

In this chapter we make use of the demographically tagged nature of the forum posts by comparing and contrasting posts made by female and male users. Some 52.02% of posts were made by posters who identified as female, 16.71% were made by male posters and 31.20% were made by posters who did not specify their sex. These figures are congruent with data on prevalence of anxiety by sex, which tends to indicate that women are more likely than men to be diagnosed with anxiety. We examine male and female keywords in the corpus, finding that men are more likely to use problem-solving language that focuses on explanations for anxiety and strategies for resolving it. On the other hand, women are more likely to use affiliative language to express empathy, sympathy and encouragement to others. The chapter also examines gendered discourses relating to anxiety by considering representations around words such as man, woman, macho and feminine. Our analysis concludes by linking our findings to consideration of gendered roles and societal stereotypes.