Exploration of Gender Differences in COVID-19 Discourse on Reddit

Jai Aggarwal, Ella Rabinovich, Suzanne Stevenson

Keywords: gender-linked language, emotion analysis, topic modeling, social media, COVID-19, distributional semantics

TL;DR: Emotion and topic analysis of COVID-related discussions on Reddit reveals significant gender differences in reactions to the pandemic.

Abstract: Decades of research on differences in the language of men and women have established postulates about the nature of lexical, topical, and emotional preferences between the two genders, along with their sociological underpinnings. Using a novel dataset of male and female linguistic productions collected from a social media platform, we further confirm existing assumptions about gender-linked affective distinctions, and demonstrate that these distinctions are amplified in the emotionally-charged discourse related to COVID-19. Our analysis also reveals considerable differences in topical preferences between male and female authors in pandemic-related discussions.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2008.05713/code)