Using Twitter to Investigate Gendered Job-related Stressors among U.S. Teachers

• In Event: 4423 - Developing and Testing Creative Synergies between the Sociology of Mental Health and Organizations, Occupations, and Work

Abstract

The current study investigates gendered manifestations of job-related stress among U.S. teachers, a highly feminized, and physio-emotionally demanding form of paid care work.
Utilizing tweets from Twitter with teacher stress-related hashtags from U.S.-based male- and female-identifying teachers in Spring 2017, this study reveals both general and gendered reports of stressors related to being a teacher in the United States. Male and female teachers tweet about many of the same teaching-related stressors but seem to differ in the motivations behind tweeting about these experiences. Results demonstrate that female teachers are using Twitter more as a venue for coping with the demands of balancing job and family demands, while male teachers utilize Twitter as a way to justify their masculinity in working in a highly feminized field via carefully constructed tweets and profiles. Results from this study suggest that teachers face different sets of stressors depending on their gender and talk about these stressors in different, gendered ways.

Author

• Lilla Pivnick, University of Texas-Austin