Gendered Language and Gender Roles: How Social Media Subtly Breeds Misogyny

By Amruta Srinivasan

At first, there is nothing overtly political or conservative about the short video. A woman assembles a meal of some sort, chopping vegetables and mincing garlic. It’s an entirely innocuous video. Until, however, you read the caption. The bright yellow font, stylized in lowercase, reads “my life because I married a provider”. It’s a subtle message, but the intention behind it is clear. The woman behind the screen quietly tells the viewer that she’s married to a man who provides for her, and that it allows her to do what she wants with her life. While there is nothing inherently wrong with a video like this, the door it opens can be deeply harmful for young women consuming such content. Telling young women, even subliminally, that they need a provider or a man who has the financial upper hand to live a fulfilling life is conservative propaganda. This content, while still reinforcing gender roles and pushing women into the domestic sphere, is not as overt in its messaging as most conservative content on social media, making it seem more benign and flood the social media feeds of young people. Still, however, micro-trends like these on social media have a grave impact on their audiences, and serve to unknowingly normalize harmful gender roles and misogyny. 

For example, originating on the social media platform TikTok, “girl math” quickly became a sweeping trend, with countless creators posting content related to it. Such trends do not initially seem to have any sway on the political landscape. How can “girl math” have any effect on the state of women in this country, or contribute to rampant internalized misogyny? As the scale of these microtrends is grossly underestimated, people, especially those online, adopt those trends and normalize them as nothing more than a funny joke. However, trends and phrases like those have more than negligible influence on how gender roles are viewed. When women are constantly made the butt of the joke in these various trends, it’s hard to pretend like they have no broader impact or meaning. The premise of “girl math” relies on the trope of women supposedly being illogical with their finances; a common example of “girl math” would be a woman claiming that buying anything under $5 is free. That is blatantly untrue, and framing it as a woman’s issue or delusion is severely harmful, even if it is under the guise of a joke. Many of these seemingly harmless trends only serve to belittle women and reinforce gender norms while doing so. For example, the rise in popularity to describe female-dominated fields or activities as “pink” and their male-dominated counterparts as “blue” further pushes harmful gender roles. A popular example of this would be a woman filming herself in a Home Depot, captioning it as “being good in the blue store so he’ll take me to the pink store”. By characterizing these different places and interests as blue or pink, the creator tells the viewer that some activities are for men, and others are for women. 

In a world where women are still constantly subjugated and oppressed by both their governments and by societal expectations, these trends are never just a fad. They are a symptom of the inequality of the world we live in, and a representation of the strict gender roles young people are still expected to force themselves into. The language used to frame the world around us eventually defines the world around us, making it even more important to understand how language on social media affects our political and social landscape.