Sexual violence and the gender pay gap

Crawley, Jill and McEnery, Tony (2026) Sexual violence and the gender pay gap. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

At the start of this study two longstanding feminist issues were highly visible on Twitter1, sexual violence, expressing itself through the #MeToo movement, and the BBC pay gap scandal. I was interested in what their discourses had in common, and any possible cultural influences. Using three search terms: sexual harassment; #MeToo; and pay gap, I harvested data from Twitter and Nexis between April 2019 and March 2021, resulting in six 2.4M word corpora. My focus was on the Twitter corpora with their Nexis equivalents providing a comparison. My analysis took a Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies approach combining: a corpus-driven element; Critical Discourse Analysis; and Feminist Post-structural Discourse Analysis. For the sexual harassment and #MeToo corpora I focused on the lemmas VICTIM and SURVIVOR, and broader modifiers within the pay gap corpora. My analysis was based on van Leeuwen’s social actor and legitimation frameworks (2008, p. 108), plus manually coded flags for prosody and veracity. There are three key findings. Firstly, tension exists between taking responsibility for ensuring personal safety and success, and blaming/shaming those who fail to do so, irrespective of structural barriers. Secondly, the majority of the disadvantaged may be missing from the discourse, silenced or muted. Thirdly, the meanings of VICTIM and SURVIVOR are changing and contested. In the west these linguistic changes are situated alongside rising neoliberalism, which favours both the individualistic self-reliance implied by SURVIVOR, and post-feminism which believes gender equality has been achieved. These corpora show that SURVIVOR is increasingly lauded for resilience and agency, but the benefits may come with obligations and expectations. Simultaneously, VICTIM becomes denigrated and weakened as a key tool for challenging disadvantage.