Uncovering Gender Bias within Journalist-Politician Interaction in Indian Twitter

In this study we investigate gender bias within journalist politician interactions in India—a country in global south. Previous work identified gender bias in online political discourse, but they focused on global north and politician-general public interaction. However, under-studied journalist-politician interactions can significantly affect public sentiment and help set gender-biased social norms in collectivistic cultures like India, motivating this work.

Specifically, we curated a gender-balanced set of the 100 most-followed Indian journalists on Twitter and the 100 most-followed politicians. Then we collected 21,188 unique tweets posted by these journalists that mentioned these politicians. Our analysis revealed that there is a significant gender bias—the frequency with which journalists mention male politicians vs. how frequently they mention female politicians is statistically significantly different (p < < 0.05). In fact, median tweets from female journalists mentioning female politicians received ten times fewer likes than median tweets from female journalists mentioning male politicians. However our emotion score analysis, topic modeling analysis and semantic similarity analysis did not reveal any significant difference between the journalists’ tweet content mentioning male politicians and those mentioning female politicians. We identify a potential reason—the high discrepancy within the number of popular male vs. female Indian politicians. Our work hint at need for platform-mediated gender diversity in the online Indian political discourse.