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Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has increasingly been defined as the shecession for its disproportionate debilitating impact on women. Despite this gendered analysis, a number of health activists have called on governments to account for the experiences of Black communities as they are disproportionately suffering the effects of this pandemic. In the media’s address of the impact of the pandemic, we ask, what experiences are represented in news stories and are Black women present in these representations. Performing a content analysis of 108 news articles, a reading of media discourses through a racial lens reveals a homogenization of women’s experiences and an absence of the Black experience. In the small number of news stories that do focus on Black women, we see that the health disparities are not simply the result of precarious work and living conditions, but also the struggle against anti-Black racism on multiple fronts. In critiquing, however, we also bring forth the small number of news stories on the Black experience that speak to the desire and hope that can thrive outside of white supremacist structures.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the world and in particular, the most marginalized in our society
We ask, in the media’s address of the impact of the pandemic on women, what experiences and impacts are represented? What assumptions are made around work-life balance? As such, are racialized women, and Black women, present in those media representations? Performing a content analysis of 108 news articles, we argue that while the media, in part, accounts for the pandemic’s crushing impact on women, it homogenizes their experiences
Despite the fact that early on, the positioning of the COVID-19 citizen was inherently privileged, distinctively middle-class and heteronormative, we noted a shift as time progressed where the pandemic was increasingly defined as a burden on women
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on the world and in particular, the most marginalized in our society. As of late, it has been defined as the shecession, a term coined by C. Feminists point to the gendered politics of work-life balance and care work disproportionately affecting women (see Alon et al 2020; Hupkau and Petrongolo 2020; Sevilla and Smith 2020). News coverage emphasizes the exacerbation felt on the part of many women concerning employment, livelihood, work-life balance, health, mortality and overall well-being. This understanding of the pandemic’s impact on women, still falls short. Empirical research in Canada finds that Black communities are disproportionately suffering the effects of this pandemic
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