COVID-19 as the Great (un)Equalizer: The Framing of Women in Media Coverage in China, the Middle East, and the U.S

ABSTRACT

International news representations of the COVID-19 crisis are particularly salient in shaping public health responses. Therefore, women's differential experiences are important to highlight in order to develop gender-responsive programming and strategies to improve global health outcomes. Informed by work on feminist political economy, this content analysis investigates how women are discursively framed during the pandemic by analyzing digital reports from three major television news channels (based in China, Qatar, and the United States). The aim is to evaluate the extent to which international media coverage reinforces gender and other power differentials within and across countries and shapes public understanding of the direct and indirect effects of the disease on women. Study findings indicate women's limited visibility in COVID-19 news and differences in framing across and within sources. The need for international media to give voice to and consider in depth the way structurally reproduced inequalities facilitate public health crises as well as the disparate effects on the health of intersecting groups including but not limited to women, people of color, gender minorities, and those located in lower income countries is reinforced in this work. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.