Persona: How professional women in China negotiate gender performance online

Abstract

With the shift of social interaction to online venues, do wo men still conform to existing gender norms? This paper examines the online performance of professional women in urban China and their interactions with workplace colleagues on WeChat, a popular Chinese social media app that is an important venue for workplace interaction. As interviews showed, workplace interactions on WeChat perpetuated traditional gender norms of hegemonic masculinity and professional women accommodated to those existing gender norms by using particular ‘personas’. Three major personas were identified: one that emphasized professional identity and downplayed gender identity; another that accentuated femininity and downplayed professional identity; and a third that performed femininity to please male workplace supervisors by confirming their masculinity. Persona is used as an analytical term to capture the WeChat activities of these professional women because, compared to online self-presentation, the persona represented a strategic conformity to existing norms and the women distanced themselves from their assumed personas. The use of social media, therefore, reproduced and reinforced conformity to existing gender norms because the online gendered persona constituted a comprehensive and enduring constraint.