Gender Representation In E-Discourse Of Banks In Pakistan: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

Electronic discourse emerged, as a new genre, in the last few decades. Like other fields of life, the internet also shifted business from traditional to virtual domains i.e. electronic commerce. Similarly, the banks in Pakistan launched their websites and online services for the purpose of running more effective business. Like other linguistic aspects, the choice of pronouns plays a significant role in making corporate communication more effective. In this regard, inclusion of certain pronouns and exclusion of other pronouns influence the effectiveness of the financial message. This newly emerged discourse needs to be gender balanced in order to be more effective for corporate communication. The current study examined the representation of gender in the e-discourse from feminist perspective. It looked at the occurrences of third person singular pronouns used for representation of men and women on web pages of banks in Pakistan. Corpus analysis tool AntConc (Anthony, 2014) was used to find out the occurrences of pronouns used for female gender and male gender in ‘About us’ section of the banks in Pakistan. Texts were copied from the websites of banks. In order to make these texts machine-readable, they were converted into plain texts. Both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis were used for better understanding of the research study. Quantitative representation of gender focusingon occurrences of pronouns was complemented with the in-depth presentation of the data. The study revealed gender-based disparities in the banking discourse. Female gender is underrepresented (12.74%) and male gender is overrepresented (87.26%). This low depiction of female gender in the discourse of banks indicates gender biasness; putting female gender in periphery and highlighting male gender by assigning greater number of occurrences.