Do Words Matter? Gendered Language and Sentiment Polarity in U.S. News Headlines Across #MeToo and COVID-19
This thesis investigates how women are portrayed in U.S. news headlines through the lens of gender bias and sentiment polarity. Using a dataset of over 130,000 headlines from major American news outlets between 2005 and 2021, the study combines a curated dictionary-based approach to detect stereotypical language with transformer-based sentiment analysis to measure tone. Two major societal disrupti
