Does Gender Play a Role?

Abstract

After the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic, a heterogeneous protest movement emerged in Austria that managed to mobilize more than 20,000 people to protest against the prevention measures imposed by the government in February 2021. The preliminary results from the survey we conducted in January showed that an unusually large proportion of women participated in these protests. In this article, we aim at exploring the gendered aspects of the protests through the use of a frame analysis. Against the backdrop of an extensive public debate on the gendered ramifications of the pandemic, we also ask whether experiences of double burden were incorporated into the problem definition. We base our analysis on a mixed-methods approach that complements the results of a quantitative protest survey with qualitative interviews, social media analysis, and data from protest observations.