Emerging Gender Issues in Korean Online Media: A Temporal Semantic Network Analysis Approach

Abstract

In South Korea, as awareness of gender equality increased since the 1990s, policies for gender equality and social awareness of equality have been established. Until recently, however, the gap between men and women in social and economic activities has not reached the globally desired level and led to social conflict throughout the country. In this study, we analyze the content of online news comments to understand the public perception of gender equality and the details of gender conflict and to grasp the emergence and diffusion process of emerging issues on gender equality. We collected text data from the online news that included the word 'gender equality' posted from January 2012 to June 2017 and also collected comments on each selected news item. Through text mining and the temporal semantic network analysis, we tracked the changes in discourse on gender equality and conflict. Results revealed that gender conflicts are increasing in the online media, and the focus of conflict is shifting from 'position and role inequality' to 'opportunity inequality'.

Keywords

• gender equality
• gender conflict
• online comment
• text mining
• semantic network analysis