Word.ws English Dictionary

missing white woman syndrome

missing white woman syndrome noun: the disproportionate media coverage of a missing person or similar case involving a young, white, upper-middle-class woman, contrasted with lesser coverage of males, non-white ethnicities, etc.

Noun

missing white woman syndrome (uncountable)

  1. (derogatory) The disproportionate media coverage of a missing person or similar case involving a young, white, upper-middle-class woman, contrasted with lesser coverage of males, non-white ethnicities, etc.
    • The Petito case, which is still unfolding (her fiancé, with whom she’d been travelling, is believed to be in hiding) seemed like another instance of what the late journalist Gwen Ifill famously described as “missing white woman syndrome”: a hunger for stories about victims who look like Petito, to...[2021 October 8, Helen Rosner, “The Long American History of “Missing White Woman Syndrome””, in The New Yorker, →ISSN

Synonyms of missing white woman syndrome

Origin of missing white woman syndrome

Coined by American journalist, television newscaster and author Gwen Ifill.

Questions about missing white woman syndrome

What does missing white woman syndrome mean?
Missing white woman syndrome means the disproportionate media coverage of a missing person or similar case involving a young, white, upper-middle-class woman, contrasted with lesser coverage of males, non-white ethnicities, etc.
What part of speech is missing white woman syndrome?
Missing white woman syndrome is a noun.

Words near missing white woman syndrome in the dictionary

  1. missing time
  2. missing times
  3. missing trader fraud
  4. missing trader frauds
  5. missing white girl syndrome
  6. missing white woman syndrome
  7. missingly
  8. missingness
  9. missings
  10. missiological
  11. missiologically

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: missing white woman syndrome (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Flame, not lame-missing white woman syndrome.wav.

Cite this entry: “missing white woman syndrome.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/missing_white_woman_syndrome. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.