Social Media and Gendered Mobilization to High-Risk Campaigns in Gender-Repressive Contexts: The Case of the 2011 Egyptian Protest Movement

ABSTRACT

Social movements have utilized social media for recruitment since the mid-2000s. Scholars agree that Facebook and Twitter mobilized people during the 2011 worldwide protest wave. However, the literature largely ignores the gendered effect of social media on mobilization. I argue that social media is especially mobilizing for women in high-risk, gender-repressive contexts. In such instances, online ties with fellow citizens offer women access to information about political issues in their countries, the opportunity to articulate political views, and a space to interact with activists. I investigate this claim using the Arab Barometer (2011), which was administered to a representative sample of Egyptians five months after the 18-day protest movement of 2011. I find that social media mobilized women but not men. My findings emphasize the gendered nature of social media and challenge the perception of Egyptian women as either westernized protestors or oppressed non-activists.

KEYWORDS:

• social movements
• gender
• social media
• Egyptian uprising

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Wayne Santoro, and Christopher Butler for critical feedback on prior drafts, Noah Painter-Davis and Reuben Thomas for statistical advice, the collectors of the Arab Barometer survey, and Afaf Abdallah for continued support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Results did not change when I re-ran the analysis with the entire sample. The probability of participating in the street protests was 3 percent for women who did not have access to online political networks and 11 percent for men who did not have access to such networks. For those who used social media for networking, the probability of protest participation was 11 percent for men and 10 percent for women. These results were statistically significant (p = .039).

² Results stayed the same when I ran a separate model for each gender. In the separate models, online political engagement had no effect on men (p = .612); it had a significant positive effect on women (p = .006). In that model, the probability of protest was 5 percent for women who were not members of online political networks and 21 percent for female members.

³ These results did not change when I ran a separate model for women. In the separate model, Western feminist ideology did not significantly affect protest participation (p = .766).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marian Azab

Marian Azab is a disabled Egyptian American woman. She is an assistant professor of sociology at Bradley University. Dr. Azab migrated to the United States in 2001 and has never gone back to Egypt since then. She did not participate in the January 25, 2011, Egyptian uprising, but she was deeply inspired by the social justice movement. At the time, Dr. Azab was finishing her MA in Social Justice and Human Rights at Arizona State University. Dr. Azab started her PhD in Sociology at the University of New Mexico in August 2011 to study social movements and race. She focuses on oppression and resistance among Arab and Arab Americans.