Men are often said to dominate political talk online, but on Twitter women kept pace. An analysis of four years of tweets found that women and men discussed politics at comparable rates, whatever their resources and whether or not gender was in the political spotlight.
The study is by Ayla Oden, Nichole M. Bauer and Lance Porter of Louisiana State University and Ke Jiang of Elon University. It was published online in Sex Roles on December 1, 2023.
Tweets from before and after 2016
The researchers built a new dataset of tweets covering a four-year period around the 2016 US presidential election. Over that span, gender and women’s issues moved from low to high political salience, giving the team a natural before-and-after comparison.
They expected women’s political talk to rise most when gender became a hot topic, especially among “resource-poor” women and women of color, who often lack the education and income usually thought to encourage political discussion.
No gender gap to close
Instead, women and men engaged in political discussion at similar rates across resource levels, in periods of both high and low gender salience. Both women of color and white women did increase their political discussion when gender was highly salient compared with when it was not.
The authors conclude that social media can close the gender gap in political discussion, regardless of women’s resources or how prominent gender is in politics at the time. The prediction that only resource-poor women would need a hot gender issue to join in did not hold: the gap the team set out to explain was not there to begin with.
Study Details:
- Title: Women’s Engagement in Political Discussion on Twitter: The Role of Gender Salience, Resources, and Race/Ethnicity
- Authors: Ayla Oden, Nichole M. Bauer, Ke Jiang, Lance Porter
- Journal: Sex Roles
- Publication Date: December 1, 2023
- DOI: 10.1007/s11199-023-01439-w