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The past decades have seen efforts to increase digital inclusion for women worldwide, with the ultimate aim to advance gender equality. However, progress is slow, despite important advances in moving beyond a focus on 'digital access' (as measured by network coverage and hardware) towards a more holistic understanding of inclusion that considers abilities, awareness and agency. Here, we propose a further theoretical shift that draws on social system theories (e.g., Luhmann, 1984) and on the theory of 'intersecting inequalities' (Kabeer, 2010). We propose to understand the gender digital gap, particularly in mobile and internet usage, not merely descriptively but dynamically – since even factors like agency and awareness change over time – by applying concepts of feedback loops, low-equilibrium traps, multi-dimensional exclusion and systems analysis. This paper highlights how women may become locked in a state of low-inclusion unless the feedback loops between digital, social, economic and political exclusion are addressed through policies that tackle multiple dimensions. The paper reviews research on gender digital gaps with particular focus on developing countries, and with direct implications for policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By analyzing Douyin users' mediated interactions with interracial couples in everyday contexts, this paper addresses the convergence of anti-blackness and domestic gender tension on Chinese social media. It introduces the perspective of 'multiple triangulations' to examine discussions of four types of interracial relationships on Douyin: black women and Chinese men, black men and Chinese women, white women and Chinese men, and white men and Chinese women. This approach complicates explanations of why Chinese social media users have been rejecting blackness in a potentially mixed-race China in relation to whiteness and Chineseness. It also illuminates how they have encoded gender tension in marriages in China into anti-black discourses. Additionally, this research highlights the race-blind digital infrastructure and the dynamic connotations of anti-black racism in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Red Table Talk, a web series exclusively aired on Facebook Watch, represents the narrative of intergenerational Black women who tackle critical conversations. The show, developed by Jada Pinkett-Smith and featuring her daughter and mother, brings in special guests for discussions on race, gender identity, sexual and mental health, co-parenting, and relationships. This paper relies on both qualitative and quantitative data from an audience survey, supplemented by thematic analysis to explore these themes. We show how the alternative media model of Facebook Watch and the series itself act as rebellions against institutionalized narratives that perpetuate stereotypes against people of color. We examine how Black women creators reclaim agency and resist generational forms of silencing by authoring a counter-narrative at the intersection of their lived cultural experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do gender and class work together to shape adolescent girls' unequal access to mobile phones within the family in Mumbai, India? What are the everyday practices and cultural logics upon which these inequalities are built? This paper addresses these questions by using a mixed-methods study of 59 group interviews and 268 surveys with adolescents aged 13–15 in Mumbai. Taking an intersectional analytical framework, the findings show how gender and class together create varying standards of 'respectable femininity' and class distinction that families aspire to and cultivate in adolescent girls. The mobile phone can be seen as both a threat and a necessity to the maintenance of these standards of respectability, resulting in families variously enabling or constraining access to mobile phones by girls. Rather than interpreting the findings through binaries of low-income/high-income or empowered/constrained, I instead consider how classed ideals of 'respectable femininity' create different aspirational conditions for girls belonging to each class group, and form the cultural frames of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early days of the internet it was hoped that going online would bring communities together, help people find each other and that social media would become a powerful advocacy tool as communities could better campaign for the causes they believed in. Instead, gender discrimination, trolling and abusive behavior are rife on the internet. This introduction provides context on women in the digital world. The papers in this special issue include research on gender and politics from political actors' and citizens' perspective, they examine the importance of the online access to information, the role of women within the tech industry, they look at online harassment, at how women are treated online, and how NGOs deal with evidence of mistreatment of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines gender-biases on Stack Overflow, the world's largest question-and-answer forum of programming knowledge. Employing a non-binary gender identification built on usernames, I investigate the role of gender in shaping users' experience in technical forums. The analysis encompasses 11-years of activity, across levels of expertise, language, and specialism, to assess if Stack Overflow is really a paradise for programmers. I first examine individual users, asking if there are gender differences in key user metrics of success, focusing on reputation points, user tenure, and level of activity. Second, I test if there are gender-biases in how technical knowledge is recognised in the question-answer format of the platform. Third, using social network analysis I investigate if interaction on Stack Overflow is organised by gender. Results show that sharing and recognising technical knowledge is dictated by users' gender, even when it is operationalised beyond a binary. I find that feminine users receive lower scores for their answers, despite exhibiting higher effort in their contributions. I also show that interaction on Stack Overflow is organised by gender. Specifically, that feminine users preferentially interact with other feminine users. The findings emphasise the central role of gender in shaping interaction in technical spaces, a necessity for participation in the masculine-dominated forum. I conclude the study with recommendations for inclusivity in online forums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decolonial-focused journalisms allows Ecuadorian indigenous women to exercise their right to revolution by deconstructing ideological paradigms through their freedom of the press. Previous research has predominantly concentrated on examining the aspects of poverty, inequality, and marginalized experiences within the realm of political communication. In contrast, this research takes a qualitative methodology, employing biographical narratives infused with insights from disciplines such as legal anthropology, feminist epistemology, decolonial studies and situated knowledge. The study delves into the exploration of three crucial variables through open interviews: (a) Precondition of journalistic practice, including the right to education, language, and access to technologies; (b) Perceived violence and inequalities based on gender, ethnicity, and journalism; (c) The relationship between the resistance exhibited by the interviewees and the configuration of the journalistic work. Consequently, this legitimate act of civil disobedience empowers indigenous women to establish their brand of justice, while their unique forms of journalisms contribute to the construction of their historical truth. This truth serves as a contrasting, denying, or even complementary narrative to the traditional truth. The use of the term 'journalisms' in the plural form highlights the fact that different indigenous groups employ diverse grammatical structures and methodologies that diverge from the conventions of the singular hegemonic press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media offer new opportunities for women in politics, but also new ground for the expression of bias and stereotypes. Drawing upon literature about mediated representations of women in politics, gendered digital violence, and intersectionality, this study explores how Twitter users portray indigenous women leaders who were elected as representatives for Chile's Constitutional Convention. We use a mixed-methods approach based on a manual content analysis of tweets (N = 6,000), aimed at comparing the main attributes associated to indigenous and non-indigenous women Convention representatives in users' tweets, as well as the valence of these tweets and the engagement of Twitter users, in two time points – the inaugural and the closing days of the Convention. This is complemented with a qualitative thematic analysis focused on tweets directed toward Mapuche women (N = 3,352). Our findings show that indigenous and non-indigenous women's capacities were discussed by Twitter users, and although both groups experienced online hostility while serving for the Convention, indigenous leaders received negative messages notoriously based on their ethnic background: tweets were mostly positive at the beginning of the process, but became more negative by the end, suggesting a narrative arc that went from an ephemeral moment of symbolic reparation to the restoration of prejudices and stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue brings together contributions and theoretical insights that probe ways through which gender interacts with context to shape non-Western-based political communication trends. It seeks to address the need to diversify theory and research in political communication. Our key contribution is to provide empirically-guided, contextually-shaped and methodologically-rich research on digital political communication strategies that facilitate women's political participation in geographical areas underrepresented in the scholarship. We do this in five ways. First, feminist approaches to digital political communication have rarely been studied this way, focusing exclusively on previously unaddressed developments in non-Western settings while also theorizing their contributions to communication scholarship through a special issue format in a credible journal that retains a wider audience. Second, it is of scholarly interest to know whether women politicians in richer and poor countries grapple with the same issues when it comes to political communication. Third, we provide novel ways to expand scholarship on women's digital political participation through incorporation of indigenous knowledge and practices. Fourth, the diversity of fresh voices coupled with pioneering findings assembled in this special issue is encouraging in a field dominated by a few. Finally, the number of women vying for political office in the Global South is increasing. Therefore, studying how they are faring on the political frontline has a significant bearing on how current and future studies within the remit of understudied non-Western digital political communication can and should be framed, paving way for new and better understandings on the region and its multifaceted political perturbations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the constraints on women's political participation in Sudan and the lack of a unified feminist agenda due to the performative involvement of elite female politicians. It focuses on the No to Women's Oppression Initiative (NtoWRI), a civil society group that utilized both digital and traditional communication methods to advance a more inclusive women's rights agenda. NtoWRI's successful campaign for the ratification of CEDAW and the Maputo Protocol was attributed, in part, to the group's radical inclusivity towards marginalized women. The involvement of grassroots women's groups with the margins provides an opportunity for social justice, amplifying the voices of marginalized communities and linking their struggles to broader social movements. The article emphasizes the need to confront the male-dominated power structures in Sudan with a feminist perspective to establish a genuine feminist collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, nonwhites, globalists and elites are plotting to eliminate the white race and its dominance through anti-white policies and increased immigration. In that context, abortion among white women is perceived by white nationalists (WN) as a betrayal of their 'biological' and 'traditional' gender role – procreation of white babies. While WN condemn abortion among white women as a murderous sin, at times they encourage the practice among nonwhites to solve demographic threats to white dominance. In this study, we use mixed methods, combining unsupervised machine learning with close textual analysis of 30,725 posts including the term 'abortion' published on the WN website Stormfront between 2001 and 2017. We identify three broad themes: White genocide, focused on the conspiracy theory and detailing the active actors in its alleged execution; political, focused on political agendas and laws; and WN reproductive reasoning, articulating and justifying the contradiction between supporting abortion for nonwhites but not for whites via politics of difference that emphasize nonwhites' supposed inferior morality. We discuss WN's unique and explicitly racist discourse around a medical topic like abortion, a staple of the conservative and religious right for decades, and how it is used to alleviate their cognitive dissonance resulting from their dual-stance on abortion. Such discourse could be harnessed to recruit members into the movement and normalize extreme, racist ideologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In April 2021, The Walt Disney Company (Disney) announced the Ultimate Princess Celebration, 'a year-long event spotlighting the courage and kindness these Disney heroines inspire in fans all around the world' (Deitchman, 2021). Princesses have remained an important element of Disney's identity and the movies they create. Broadening research beyond these characters and examining a larger sample demonstrated distinctions in the characteristics present in Official Disney Princess (ODP) movies, Actual Princess (AP) movies, and the 45 in the full catalog (All-Movies) that are or share characteristics with Disney Princess Movies. This article compares the race, class, and gender of the protagonist and antagonist as well as other story elements of 45 animated or partially animated movies that typify Disney's 'Classics Period' between 1937 and 2017 across those three groups. This work examines the ways in which the ODP and AP are different from the overall catalog and violate some of the Disney norms to which we are accustomed while fully embracing others. The research found that while the Official Princess movies had more racial diversity in the main characters than the overall catalog, for example, they also had more stereotypical female villains, more magic, and more romance. Acknowledging these divisions can lead to more robust research where a research sample can be critically collected based on the topic of interest. This article provides a foundation for those examinations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, mainstream digital gaming has long been marked by compulsory (hetero)sexuality and hypermasculine gender norms, making it an ideal arena for exploring gendered power relations. This article critically examines how the participation of Chinese women digital gamers has taken on a distinctive shape in the context of newly emerging local online games that serve as an extension of the market mechanism. We examine the players' experience of two games: namely, a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, King of Glory (wangzhe rongyao), and an otome love simulation game, Evol LoveR (lian yu zhizuoren). Results of 31 in-depth qualitative interviews with Chinese women gamers show that Chinese women's gaming experience has been profoundly shaped by both changes and continuities in the norms governing Chinese women's participation in play, romance and sex. We conclude that Chinese MOBA and otome games are not isolated new media products, but actually part and parcel of a broader digital media economy which provides audiences and players with information and cues that reinforce the dominant view that women and men have fundamentally different characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research about online comment fields on news websites tends to foreground their potential for deliberative discussions whilst little attention is given to the ways these spaces reinforce existing gender inequalities. This study analyses online newspaper comments on articles about gender based violence to establish whether the historic marginalisation of women within public discussions is being reasserted online. Using thematic analysis, this study found that responses were characterised by disbelief. Posters questioned the type and nature of evidence that had been provided, they questioned whether these problems resulted from sexism and they questioned the feminist agenda behind the blogs. While voices expressing disbelief were dominant, there were counter-voices attempting to critique the scepticism by advocating for the importance of the lived experience women and girls. The study demonstrates that online comments on news websites operate as gendered spaces that can marginalise women from the public discussion of social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online, anyone's words can easily be amplified – and on Twitter, the platform's algorithm highlights tweets that gain attention from other users, which can exponentially reinforce a tweet's popularity. Moreover, retweets can help spread a message well beyond the reach of its original poster. Thus, users' interactions with posts containing or making reference to racism or sexism both illuminate the ways individuals accept, challenge, or engage with racism and sexism online, and shape how those messages spread. Using an original dataset of 59.5 million tweets, I test how particular features of messages referencing Black and Asian women predict user engagement (retweets, likes, and replies). This analysis further focuses on messages including terms that express racist or sexist content. Generally, messages including covert racist or sexist insults have a modest positive effect on all measures of user engagement (retweets, likes, and replies), which may suggest that social media environments allow individuals the time and opportunity to contend with topics that can be more difficult in-person. Additionally, variations in engagement with tweets that include references to women, Black or Asian individuals implies that users respond differently to messages involving references to and normative images of different racial, ethnic, and gendered identities. This research illuminates how specific manifestations of racialized and gendered language referencing women, Black and Asian people can not only encourage more engagement, but also share, accept, or challenge messages about marginalized identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on the communication styles of male and female candidates on Facebook during the 2017 parliamentary election campaign in the Czech Republic. It tests the assumption that female candidates engage in a more personal and interactive style of communication than male candidates. The Czech Republic provides a hard test of this hypothesis given that the electoral system poses weak incentives for candidates to run personal campaigns and the political culture exhibits strong gender stereotypes. We analyze the use of personalized content, technological disclosure, and interactivity in 1637 Facebook posts created by 227 candidates. The findings are in line with previous research and show that female candidates did not significantly differ from male candidates in the way they communicated on social networking sites (SNSs). The study extends our understanding of how communication styles are used in a political context. It suggests that politics presents a specific context which motivates politicians to pursue communication styles that overturn traditional stereotypes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]