ANALYZING THE SPATIO-TEMPORAL CHARACTERISTICS OF PUBLIC INTEREST IN GENDER DISCRIMINATION THROUGH BAIDU INDEX DATA

Gender equality has always been a hot topic of global concern. This study aims to understand the temporal and spatial characteristics of public interest towards gender discrimination in China, providing information support for eliminating gender discrimination and promoting social equity in China to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 5. It uses Baidu Index as the research tool, selecting gender discrimination as the keyword, taking July 1, 2013, to October 13, 2022, as the research interval to analyze the trend research, demand map, and population portrait of gender discrimination. It has been found that the search trend of gender discrimination has been slowly rising year by year, from the overall trend of personal computers (PC) and mobile. The peak appears periodically during the Spring Festival and summer vacation each year; “Gender discrimination” has a significant peak in early March 2017 and mid-June 2022. Additionally, the public also shows great concern for discrimination and racial discrimination. Most netizens who pay attention to gender discrimination come from East China. Females pay more attention to gender discrimination than males, and most of the females are under 19 years old and 20-29 years old. Finally, it contrastively analyzes the search trend of terms such as “discrimination” and “gender discrimination” and finds that the search index of “discrimination” is like that of “gender discrimination.”