Women worry about family, men about the economy: Gender differences in emotional responses to COVID-19

Among the critical challenges around the COVID-19 pandemic is dealing with potentially detrimental effects on people's mental health. Designing appropriate interventions and identifying the concerns of those most at risk requires methods that can extract worries, concerns and emotional responses from text data. We examine gender differences and the effect of document length on worries about the ongoing COVID-19 situation. Our findings suggest that i) shorter texts do not offer an as adequate insight into psychological processes as longer texts. We further find ii) marked gender differences in topics concerning emotional responses. Women worried more about their loved ones and severe health concerns while men were more occupied with effects on the economy and society. The findings align with general gender differences in language found elsewhere, but the current unique circumstances likely amplified these effects. We close this paper with a call for more high-quality datasets due to the limitations of Tweet-sized data.