FEMALE teachers get raped and MALE teachers commit sexual harassment?

Abstract

This study explores overt gender markers ( nü ‘female’ and nan ‘male’) with the profession noun laoshi ‘teacher’ in Mandarin Chinese news reports and their pragmatic implications. As Mandarin does not have grammatical gender, we examine whether indicating a referent’s gender through overt marking in news texts, an act of avoiding indeterminacy of interpretation, also serves to reinforce societal gender norms and to align with journalists’ judgments about the relevance of the referent’s gender and the newsworthiness of a story. A total of 20,909 news snippets spanning eight years were annotated, and bag-of-words logistic regression classifiers were applied to predict the presence of overt gender markers around the noun laoshi ‘teacher.’ The results show that female teachers are more likely to be overtly marked by their gender and associated with violent or sexual incidents, as well as attributes related to appearance and marital status, while male teachers tend to be associated with events such as harassment or romantic relationships. These results suggest that overt gender markers are used as pragmatic devices to frame narratives in a way that aligns with societal gender stereotypes.