Twitter's Glass Ceiling: The Effect of Perceived Gender on Online Visibility
By Shirin Nilizadeh, Anne Groggel, Peter Lista, Srijita Das, Yong-Yeol Ahn, Apu Kapadia, F. Rojas. 2016
64 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Social media is a new public sphere where people can, in principle, communicate with each other regardless of their status. However, social categories like gender may still bias online communication, replicating offline disparities. Examining over 94,000 Twitter users, we investigate the association between perceived gender and measures of online visibility: how often Twitter users are followed, assigned to lists, and retweeted. Our analysis shows that users perceived as female experience a 'glass ceiling,' similar to the barrier women face in attaining higher positions in companies. For users in lower quartiles of visibility, being perceived as female is associated with more visibility; however, this tendency flips among the most visible users where being perceived as male is strongly associated with more visibility. Our results suggest that gender presented in social media profiles likely frame interactions as well as perpetuates old inequalities online.
Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Human-Computer Interaction
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In Communication
In Sociology and Political Science
- Krishna P. Gummadi
- Mathieu Heruer
- Maarten de Rijke
- Daan Odijk
- Martijn Spitters
- Anne Schuth
- Maartje ter Hoeve
- Meeyoung Cha
In Human-Computer Interaction
Citations in the corpus
- Do News Consumers Want Explanations for Personalized News Rankings (2017, background): “Crowdsourcing tasks differ significantly in their complexity and the skills required by the worker completing those tasks [5, 16].”
- Who Makes Trends? Understanding Demographic Biases in Crowdsourced Recommendations (2017, background): “Finally, 9nytimes.com/2016/07/08/us/dallas-police-officers-killed.html 10talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/suspect-killed-bomb-robot #PrayForPeace was promoted by young white women.”
- Demographics of News Sharing in the U.S. Twittersphere (2017, background): “Nilizadeh et al. [31] explore gender inequalities in Twitter, showing that gender may allow inequality to persist in terms of online visibility.”