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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Commun.
Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1535312

Men as offenders while women as victims: A corpus-based study of men and women in the United Nations

Provisionally accepted
Jiaqi XUE Jiaqi XUE *
  • Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR China

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    This study examines the representations of men and women in the United Nations Parallel Corpus-English (UNPC-E) by using the corpus linguistics tool, Sketch Engine. Three types of grammatical collocations were explored, including verbs frequently collocating with MAN and WOMAN when they serve as subjects and objects, and adjectives used as predicates in relation to them. The results reveal that within the UN discourse, men are often portrayed as offenders while women tend to be depicted as victims. This pattern of representations may stem from the UN's agenda focused on addressing gender-based inequality, as well as from the conventional reporting bias that might have influenced data availability. In general, this study broadens the scope of research in the field of gender and corpus linguistics to some extent, offering a more comprehensive and international perspective on the representations of men and women through the analysis of the UN corpus.

    Keywords: MEN and women, representation, The United Nations, corpus linguistics, Sketch Engine

    Received: 28 Nov 2024; Accepted: 29 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 XUE. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Jiaqi XUE, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong, SAR China

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