Stigmatized portrayals of single women: a content analysis of news coverage on single women and single men in China

Abstract

This study explored the stigmatized portrayals of single womanhood in news media by content analyzing news coverage from Mainland China of single women and single men from 2008 to 2013. Among the three prevalent news frames (conflict, responsibility, and human interest), the results showed that news reports relating to single women commonly employed more human-interest frames and concentrated on single women’s conflicts with other social groups as well as the conflicts between singles and societal expectation of population sustainability. News stories also unduly ascribed the responsibility for being ‘single’ to the women themselves, but such individual attribution was not applied to single men. As an exploratory study, our research shed light on how news framing is gendered to reinforce stereotypes and facilitate mechanisms for control. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed in relation to public opinion about single womanhood and the intersectional oppression of single women in Chinese society.

Keywords:

• News frames
• single women
• stereotype
• gender roles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Spinster’ refers to unmarried women while ‘bachelor’ means unmarried men. These two are neutral terms while ‘leftover women’ and ‘leftover men’ have negative connotations.

2. Cross-tabulation analysis delineates a joint frequency distribution of cases on two or more categorical variables. The indicators, χ² value and degree of freedom (i.e. df), are adopted to acquire a p value based on χ² distribution (Michael, 2001). Generally in social sciences, if p value is smaller than .05, we could infer that the deviations are caused by deviations among different categories rather than random errors or systematic errors (Fisher & Yates, 1963).