Assessing Externalities: Gender in Societies / Gendered Othering on Social Media

In order to understand gender injustice and combat gender discrimination on media platforms in Europe, we need to understand what gender injustice currently looks like and -importantly- what it can look like in the future. How can we imagine gender in Europe? We will use the conceptual frame of gendered othering to analyze gender in relation to social media platforms. To start, we dive deeper into theoretical reflections on gender. We explain what gender and sex and their differences are. This is done with an eye for intersectionality. We need to use the intersectional lens to then expand on the meaning of gendered othering. After having explained this concept, we consider the data from the EUMEPLAT project. We can see how different studies within the project have contributed to an understanding of gender in social media platforms. This allows us to understand the current situation with regards to gender, othering and social media. Now, we know what gender injustice currently looks like on social media. However, part of our research question remains; what can it look like in the future? For this, we have produced and gathered various possible future scenarios.

We worked on the basis that grounded theory and data are conceptualised as a site of ideological negotiations and we looked for similar discourses and reoccurring arguments. After analyzing them from a discourse theoretical perspective (Foucault, 1975; Arribas-Ayllon & Walkerdine, 2008), we were able to identify three main themes.

These themes show us in different ways what gender (in)justice (on social media) can look like in 20 or 30 years from now. Some of the future scenarios are more or less desirable. All of them show where we as a European society could end up being.

Understanding future scenarios and possibilities in relation to gender is important because it entails what we have to do in the present to either prevent or encourage different future scenarios from happening.