A women's issue? The role of backlash and issue ownership in users' engagement with articles about gender equality

Abstract

Gender equality issues are receiving increasing media attention. At the same time, journalists reporting on such issues experience hostility and online harassment. This study investigates which factors drive users' intentions to engage with journalistic content on gender equality issues and whether the author's gender plays a role in this. An experiment was conducted among German online users (n=612) with issue ownership and backlash as two central mechanisms to explain gendered perceptions and engagement with articles on gender equalityissues. Results show that men journalists writing about harassment in the workplace were perceived more negatively than women journalists writing about the same issue, which partially also affects engagement. In the case of a less sensitive topic such as women's leadership, participants' feminine gender role orientation increased intentions to engage with the article written by a woman, whereas in the case of a sensitive topic such as harassment it fostered backlash toward the woman author. Findings indicate that both backlash theory and role congruity theory account for distinct partially contradicting effects of gender norms and role perceptions on the engagement with articles on gender equality issues.