The role of media use in the genderization of disease: The Interplay of sex, culture, and cultivation

A large body of cross-national research grounded in cultivation theory has shown that media use contributes to gender stereotypes across media platforms and content types, including health messages. However, little is known about the relationship between media use and gendered perceptions of diseases. This topic is important for health communication scholars because if individuals, including health professionals, associate certain conditions more with one gender than the other, they may miscalculate health risks, or inadvertently contribute to the stigmatization of diseases. This in turn can cause delays in treatment or result in inconsistent or even incorrect diagnoses. The present work aims to investigate how media use (generally and genre-specific) contributes to genderized perceptions of disease beyond other potential influences such as biological sex and cultural upbringing. Results from this cross-national survey (N = 1,299) showed that young adults viewed most diseases as more prevalent among one gender and that media significantly contributed to the variance in disease genderization, even after controlling for participant sex and cultural background. The more respondents watched medical media content, the more they feminized diseases. In all, medical media appear to cultivate a view on illness as being (somewhat) more typical for women than for men.