[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/ skip to main content
research-article

She's Reddit: : A source of statistically significant gendered interest information?

Published: 01 July 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Information about gender differences in interests is necessary to disentangle the effects of discrimination and choice when gender inequalities occur, such as in employment. This article assesses gender differences in interests within the popular social news and entertainment site Reddit. A method to detect terms that are statistically significantly used more by males or females in 181 million comments in 100 subreddits shows that gender affects both the selection of subreddits and activities within most of them. The method avoids the hidden gender biases of topic modelling for this task. Although the method reveals statistically significant gender differences in interests for topics that are extensively discussed on Reddit, it cannot give definitive causes, and imitation and sharing within the site mean that additional checking is needed to verify the results. Nevertheless, with care, Reddit can serve as a useful source of insights into gender differences in interests.

References

[1]
[2]
T. Ammari, S. Schoenebeck, D.M. Romero, Pseudonymous parents: Comparing parenting roles and identities on the Mommit and Daddit subreddits, in: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, New York, NY, ACM Press., 2018, pp. 489–501.
[3]
S. Bakhshi, D.A. Shamma, L. Kennedy, Y. Song, P. de Juan, J.J. Kaye, Fast, cheap, and good: Why animated GIFs engage us, in: Proceedings of the 2016 conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI2016), New York, NY, ACM Press, 2016, pp. 575–586.
[4]
C. Benesch, An empirical analysis of the gender gap in news consumption, Journal of Media Economics 25 (3) (2012) 147–167.
[5]
Y. Benjamini, Y. Hochberg, Controlling the false discovery rate: A practical and powerful approach to multiple testing, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series B (Methodological) (1995) 289–300.
[6]
D. Biber, S. Conrad, Variation in English: Multi-dimensional studies, Routledge, Abingdon, UK, 2001.
[7]
K. Bischoping, Gender differences in conversation topics, 1922–1990, Sex Roles 28 (1-2) (1993) 1–18.
[8]
F.D. Blau, L.M. Kahn, Gender differences in pay, Journal of Economic Perspectives 14 (4) (2000) 75–99.
[9]
D.M. Boyd, Taken out of context: American teen sociality in networked publics, University of California, Berkeley, 2008.
[10]
T. Bradshaw, B. Nichols, Reading at risk: A survey of literary reading in America, National Endowment for the Arts. Research Division, Washington, DC, 2004.
[11]
P.B. Brandtzaeg, Facebook is no “Great equalizer” a big data approach to gender differences in civic engagement across countries., Social Science Computer Review 35 (1) (2017) 103–125.
[12]
C.L. Brennan, K.M. Swartout, S.L. Cook, D.J. Parrott, A qualitative analysis of offenders’ emotional responses to perpetrating sexual assault, Sexual Abuse 30 (4) (2018) 393–412.
[13]
M.E. Brewster, Atheism, gender, and sexuality, eds. in: S. Bullivant, M. Ruse (Eds.), The oxford handbook of atheism., OUP Press, Oxford, UK, 2013, pp. 511–524.
[14]
T. Buntinx-Krieg, J. Caravaglio, R. Domozych, R.P. Dellavalle, Dermatology on Reddit: Elucidating trends in dermatologic communications on the world wide web, Dermatology Online Journal 23 (7) (2017) 2.
[15]
S. Chang-Kredl, D. Colannino, Constructing the image of the teacher on Reddit: Best and worst teachers, Teaching and Teacher Education 64 (1) (2017) 43–51.
[16]
I.D. Cherney, K. London, Gender-linked differences in the toys, television shows, computer games, and outdoor activities of 5- to 13-year-old children, Sex Roles 54 (9-10) (2006) 717.
[17]
P.G. Christenson, J.B. Peterson, Genre and gender in the structure of music preferences, Communication Research 15 (3) (1988) 282–301.
[18]
C. Clark, S. Osborne, R. Akerman, Young people's self-perceptions as readers: An investigation including family, peer and school influences, National Literacy Trust., London, 2008.
[19]
A. Collins, C. Hand, M. Linnell, Analyzing repeat consumption of identical cultural goods: Some exploratory evidence from moviegoing, Journal of Cultural Economics 32 (3) (2008) 187–199.
[20]
H. Darwin, Doing gender beyond the binary: A virtual ethnography, Symbolic Interaction 40 (3) (2017) 317–334.
[21]
M. De Choudhury, S.S. Sharma, T. Logar, W. Eekhout, R.C. Nielsen, Gender and cross-cultural differences in social media disclosures of mental illness, in: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM conference on computer supported cooperative work and social computing, New York, NY, ACM Press., 2017, pp. 353–369.
[22]
C. Derksen, A. Serlachius, K.J. Petrie, N. Dalbeth, “What say ye gout experts?” A content analysis of questions about gout posted on the social news website Reddit., BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders 18 (1) (2017) 488.
[23]
A.B. Diekman, E.R. Brown, A.M. Johnston, E.K. Clark, Seeking congruity between goals and roles: A new look at why women opt out of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers, Psychological Science 21 (8) (2010) 1051–1057.
[24]
B. Dietz-Uhler, E.A. Harrick, C. End, L. Jacquemotte, Sex differences in sport fan behavior and reasons for being a sport fan, Journal of Sport Behavior 23 (3) (2000) 219–231.
[25]
R.I. Dunbar, A. Marriott, N.D. Duncan, Human conversational behavior, Human Nature 8 (3) (1997) 231–246.
[26]
H. Evans, Do women only talk about “female issues”? Gender and issue discussion on Twitter., Online Information Review 40 (5) (2016) 660–672.
[27]
B. Fabian, A. Baumann, M. Keil, Privacy on Reddit? Towards large-scale user classification, in: Twenty-third European conference on information systems (ECIS2015)., Munster, Germany, 2015, pp. 1–13.
[28]
R. Farber, ‘Transing’ fitness and remapping transgender male masculinity in online message boards, Journal of Gender Studies 26 (3) (2017) 254–268.
[29]
S. Faralli, G. Stilo, P. Velardi, What women like: A gendered analysis of twitter users’ interests based on a twixonomy, in: Ninth international AAAI conference on web and social media, Menlo Park, CA, AAAI Press, 2015, pp. 34–42.
[30]
S.C. Finlay, Age and gender in Reddit commenting and success, Journal of Information Science Theory and Practice 2 (3) (2014) 18–28.
[31]
D. Gaffney, J.N. Matias, Caveat Emptor, Computational Social Science: Large-scale missing data in a widely-published Reddit Corpus, PloS One 13 (7) (2018).
[32]
W. Gantz, L.A. Wenner, Men, women, and sports: Audience experiences and effects, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 35 (2) (1991) 233–243.
[33]
M. Glenski, C. Pennycuff, T. Weninger, Consumers and curators: Browsing and voting patterns on Reddit, IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems 4 (4) (2017) 196–206.
[34]
R.J. Gooden, H.R. Winefield, Breast and prostate cancer online discussion boards: A thematic analysis of gender differences and similarities, Journal of Health Psychology 12 (1) (2007) 103–114.
[35]
B.J. Hale, M.E. Grabe, Visual war: A content analysis of Clinton and Trump subreddits during the 2016 campaign, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (2018) https://doi.org/10.1177/1077699018766501.
[36]
T. Hartmann, I. Möller, C. Krause, Factors underlying male and female use of violent video games, New Media & Society 17 (11) (2015) 1777–1794.
[37]
J. Hathaway, What is Gamergate, and why? An explainer for non-geeks, Gawker. (2014) http://gawker.com/what-is-gamergate-and-why-an-explainer-for-non-geeks-1642909080.
[38]
M. Hines, Gender development and the human brain, Annual Review of Neuroscience 34 (2011) 69–88.
[39]
K. Holmberg, I. Hellsten, Gender differences in the climate change communication on Twitter, Internet Research 25 (5) (2015) 811–828.
[40]
P. Holtz, N. Kronberger, W. Wagner, Analyzing internet forums: A practical guide, Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications 24 (2) (2012) 55–66.
[41]
B.D. Horne, S. Adali, S. Sikdar, Identifying the social signals that drive online discussions: A case study of Reddit communities, in: 2017 26th international conference on computer communication and networks (ICCCN), Los Alamitos, CA, IEEE Press, 2017, pp. 1–9.
[42]
S. Hughes‐Hassell, P. Rodge, The leisure reading habits of urban adolescents, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy 51 (1) (2007) 22–33.
[43]
J.S. Hyde, Gender similarities and differences, Annual Review of Psychology 65 (2014) 373–398.
[44]
Iqbal, H.R.; Ashraf, M.A.; Nawab, R.M.A. (2015): Predicting an author's demographics from text using topic modeling approach. CLEF (Working Notes) http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1391/75-CR.pdf.
[45]
J.D. James, L.L. Ridinger, Female and male sport fans: A comparison of sport consumption motives, Journal of Sport Behavior 25 (3) (2002) 260–278.
[46]
M.R. Jamnik, D.J. Lane, The use of Reddit as an inexpensive source for high-quality Data, Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation 22 (5) (2017) 1–10.
[47]
P. Juergens, B. Stark, The power of default on Reddit: A general model to measure the influence of information intermediaries, Policy & Internet 9 (4) (2017) 395–419.
[48]
A. Kasunic, G. Kaufman, "At least the pizzas you make are hot": Norms, values, and abrasive humor on the Subreddit r/RoastMe, in: ICWSM. Menlo Park, CA, IEEE Press, 2018, pp. 161–170.
[49]
C. Kiene, A. Monroy-Hernández, B.M. Hill, Surviving an eternal September: How an online community managed a surge of newcomers, in: Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing Systems, New York, NY, ACM Press, 2016, pp. 1152–1156.
[50]
S. Knobloch-Westerwick, S. Alter, The gender news use divide: Americans’ sex-typed selective exposure to online news topics., Journal of Communication 57 (4) (2007) 739–758.
[51]
P. Kumar, A. Gruzd, C. Haythornthwaite, S. Gilbert, M. Esteve del Valle, D. Paulin, Learning in the wild: Coding Reddit for learning and practice, in: Proceedings of the 51st Hawaii international conference on system sciences (HICSS2018)., Los Alamitos, IEEE Press, 2018, pp. 1933–1942.
[52]
H. Kwak, C. Lee, H. Park, S. Moon, What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?, in: Proceedings of the 19th international conference on the world wide web, New York, NY, ACM Press, 2010, pp. 591–600.
[53]
S. Lagaert, H. Roose, Gender differences in leisure time cultural consumption among adolescents: The impact of gender identity, gender role stereotypes and socialization, in: Society for the Study of Social Problems Annual Meeting, Abstracts. Presented at the Society for the Study of Social Problems Annual Meeting, 2015.
[54]
S.T. Leatherdale, R. Ahmed, Alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco use among Canadian youth: Do we need more multi-substance prevention programming?, The Journal of Primary Prevention 31 (3) (2010) 99–108.
[55]
W.H. Lim, M.J. Carman, S.M.J. Wong, Estimating relative user expertise for content quality prediction on Reddit, in: Proceedings of the 28th ACM conference on hypertext and social media, New York, NY, ACM Press, 2017, pp. 55–64.
[56]
X. Liu, M. Sun, J. Li, Research on gender differences in online health communities, International Journal of Medical Informatics 111 (1) (2018) 172–181.
[57]
Z. Lin, N. Salehi, B. Yao, Y. Chen, M.S. Bernstein, Better when it was smaller? Community content and behavior after massive growth., in: International AAAI conference on web and social media (ICWSM2017), Menlo Park, CA, AIII Press, 2017, pp. 132–141. http://itsmrlin.com/papers/2017_icwsm_eternal_september.pdf.
[58]
T. Loveless, The 2015 brown center report on american education, The Brookings Institution, Washington, DC, 2015.
[59]
E. Martin, Surveys as social indicators: Problems in monitoring trends, in: P. Rossi, J. Wright, A. Anderson (Eds.), Handbook of survey research, Elsevier, Amsterdam, NL, 1983, pp. 677–743.
[60]
A.E. Marwick, Scandal or sex crime? Gendered privacy and the celebrity nude photo leaks, Ethics and Information Technology 19 (3) (2017) 177–191.
[61]
A. Massanari, #Gamergate and the Fappening: How Reddit's algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures, New Media & Society 19 (3) (2017) 329–346.
[62]
S.B. Merriam, E.J. Tisdell, Qualitative research: A guide to design and implementation, John Wiley & Sons, New York, NY, 2015.
[63]
P.K. Mo, S.H. Malik, N.S. Coulson, Gender differences in computer-mediated communication: A systematic literature review of online health-related support groups, Patient Education and Counseling 75 (1) (2009) 16–24.
[64]
B. Nardi, My life as a night elf priest: An anthropological account of world of warcraft, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI, 2010.
[65]
NEA, To read or not to read: A question of national consequence, National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC, 2007.
[66]
A.L. Nobles, C.N. Dreisbach, J. Keim-Malpass, L.E. Barnes, "Is this an STD? Please help!": Online information seeking for sexually transmitted diseases on Reddit, in: ICWSM, 2018, pp. 660–663.
[67]
D. O'Callaghan, D. Greene, J. Carthy, P. Cunningham, An analysis of the coherence of descriptors in topic modeling, Expert Systems with Applications 42 (13) (2015) 5645–5657.
[68]
G.L. Pappa, T.O. Cunha, P.V. Bicalho, A. Ribeiro, A.P.C. Silva, W. Meira, et al., Factors associated with weight change in online weight management communities: A case study in the LoseIt Reddit community, Journal of Medical Internet Research 19 (1) (2017) e17.
[69]
A. Park, M. Conway, Longitudinal changes in psychological states in online health community members: Understanding the long-term effects of participating in an online depression community, Journal of Medical Internet Research 19 (3) (2017) e71.
[70]
T.F. Pettijohn, G.M. Naples, L.A. McDermott, Gender, college year, and romantic relationship status differences in embarrassment and self attitudes of college students, Individual Differences Research 8 (3) (2010) 164–170.
[71]
E.H. Pflugfelder, Reddit's “Explain like I'm five”: Technical descriptions in the wild., Technical Communication Quarterly 26 (1) (2017) 25–41.
[72]
K. Porter, Analyzing the DarkNetMarkets subreddit for evolutions of tools and trends using LDA topic modeling, Digital Investigation 26 (2018) S87–S97.
[73]
L. Pridgeon, S. Grogan, Understanding exercise adherence and dropout: An interpretative phenomenological analysis of men and women's accounts of gym attendance and non-attendance. Qualitative research in sport, Exercise and Health 4 (3) (2012) 382–399.
[74]
H. Purohit, T. Banerjee, A. Hampton, V.L. Shalin, N. Bhandutia, A. Sheth, Gender-based violence in 140 characters or fewer: A# BigData case study of Twitter, First Monday 21 (1) (2016) https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v21i1.6148.
[75]
Z. Qiu, H. Shen, User clustering in a dynamic social network topic model for short text streams, Information Sciences 414 (1) (2017) 102–116.
[76]
T.B.A. Rakib, L.K. Soon, Using the Reddit corpus for cyberbully detection, in: Asian conference on intelligent information and database systems, Springer, Cham, 2018, pp. 180–189.
[77]
Rappaz, J., Catasta, M., West, R., & Aberer, K. (2018). Latent structure in collaboration: The case of Reddit r/place. arXiv preprint arXiv:1804.05962.
[79]
F. Rehbein, A. Staudt, M. Hanslmaier, S. Kliem, Video game playing in the general adult population of Germany: Can higher gaming time of males be explained by gender specific genre preferences?, Computers in Human Behavior 55 (2016) 729–735.
[80]
M. Scharkow, R. Festl, J. Vogelgesang, T. Quandt, Beyond the “core-gamer”: Genre preferences and gratifications in computer games, Computers in Human Behavior 44 (2015) 293–298.
[81]
T.S. Schepis, R.A. Desai, D.A. Cavallo, A.E. Smith, A. McFetridge, T.B. Liss, et al., Gender differences in adolescent marijuana use and associated psychosocial characteristics, Journal of Addiction Medicine 5 (1) (2011) 65–73.
[82]
H.A. Schwartz, J.C. Eichstaedt, M.L. Kern, L. Dziurzynski, S.M. Ramones, M. Agrawal, et al., Personality, gender, and age in the language of social media: The open-vocabulary approach, PloS One 8 (9) (2013) e73791.
[83]
J.R. Sehulster, Things we talk about, how frequently, and to whom: Frequency of topics in everyday conversation as a function of gender, age, and marital status, The American Journal of Psychology 119 (3) (2006) 407–432.
[84]
R. Sharma, B. Wigginton, C. Meurk, P. Ford, C.E. Gartner, Motivations and limitations associated with vaping among people with mental illness: A qualitative analysis of Reddit discussions, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 14 (1) (2016) 7.
[85]
L. Shifman, H. Levy, M. Thelwall, Internet jokes: The secret agents of globalization?, Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication 19 (4) (2014) 727–743.
[86]
L. Shifman, An anatomy of a YouTube meme, New Media & Society 14 (2) (2012) 187–203.
[87]
L. Shifman, Memes in digital culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2014.
[88]
A.W. Smith, Porn architecture: User tagging and filtering in two online pornography communities, Communication Design Quarterly Review 3 (1) (2015) 17–23.
[89]
Smith, S.L.; Choueiti, M.; Pieper, K. (2018): Inclusion in the recording studio? Gender and race/ethnicity of artists, songwriters & producers across 600 popular songs from 2012-2017. http://assets.uscannenberg.org/docs/inclusion-in-the-recording-studio.pdf.
[90]
A. Simpson, Fictions and facts: An investigation of the reading practices of girls and boys., English Education 28 (4) (1996) 268–279.
[91]
S.J. Sowles, M. McLeary, A. Optican, E. Cahn, M.J. Krauss, E.E. Fitzsimmons-Craft, et al., A content analysis of an online pro-eating disorder community on Reddit, Body image 24 (2018) 137–144.
[92]
R. Su, J. Rounds, P.I. Armstrong, Men and things, women and people: A meta-analysis of sex differences in interests, Psychological Bulletin 135 (6) (2009) 859–884.
[93]
N.M. Sussman, D.H. Tyson, Sex and power: Gender differences in computer-mediated interactions, Computers in Human Behavior 16 (4) (2000) 381–394.
[94]
P. Taylor, C. Funk, P. Craighill, Americans to rest of world: Soccer not really our thing, Pew Research Center, 2006, http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/10/Sports.pdf.
[95]
U. Tellhed, M. Bäckström, F. Björklund, Will I fit in and do well? The importance of social belongingness and self-efficacy for explaining gender differences in interest in STEM and HEED majors, Sex Roles 77 (1-2) (2017) 86–96.
[96]
S.J. Tepper, Fiction reading in America: Explaining the gender gap, Poetics 27 (4) (2000) 255–275.
[97]
M. Thelwall, Fk yea I swear: Cursing and gender in MySpace, Corpora 3 (1) (2008) 83–107.
[98]
M. Thelwall, Introduction to Webometrics: Quantitative web research for the social sciences, Morgan & Claypool, San Rafael, CA., 2009.
[99]
M. Thelwall, F. Vis, Gender and image sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp in the UK: Hobbying alone or filtering for friends? Aslib, Journal of Information Management 69 (6) (2017) 702–720.
[100]
M. Thelwall, D. Wilkinson, S. Uppal, Data mining emotion in social network communication: Gender differences in MySpace, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 61 (1) (2010) 190–199.
[101]
A.W. Tu, P.A. Ratner, J.L. Johnson, Gender differences in the correlates of adolescents' cannabis use, Substance Use & Misuse 43 (10) (2008) 1438–1463.
[102]
T. Underwood, D. Bamman, S. Lee, The transformation of gender in English-language fiction, Cultural Analytics. (2018),.
[103]
UNDP (2016): Table 5: Gender Inequality Index. http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/GII.
[104]
S. Van Oerle, D. Mahr, A. Lievens, Coordinating online health communities for cognitive and affective value creation, Journal of Service Management 27 (4) (2016) 481–506.
[105]
S. Verba, N. Burns, K.L. Schlozman, Knowing and caring about politics: Gender and political engagement, The Journal of Politics 59 (4) (1997) 1051–1072.
[106]
S.C. Walton, R.E. Rice, Mediated disclosure on Twitter: The roles of gender and identity in boundary impermeability, valence, disclosure, and stage, Computers in Human Behavior 29 (4) (2013) 1465–1474.
[107]
Y.C. Wang, M. Burke, R.E. Kraut, Gender, topic, and audience response: An analysis of user-generated content on Facebook, in: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, New York, NY, ACM Press, 2013, pp. 31–34.
[108]
P. Wühr, B.P. Lange, S. Schwarz, Tears or Fears? Comparing gender stereotypes about movie preferences to actual preferences, Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017) 428. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00428.
[109]
T. Xia, X. Song, D. Huang, S. Miyazawa, Z. Fan, R. Jiang, et al., Outbound behavior analysis through social network data: A case study of Chinese people in Japan, in: In Big Data (Big Data), 2017 IEEE International Conference, Los Alamitos, CA, IEEE Press., 2017, pp. 2778–2786. on.
[110]
D. Yang, S. Counts, Understanding self-narration of personally experienced racism on Reddit, ICWSM, 2018, pp. 704–707.
[111]
J. Yoon, E. Chung, How images are conversed on Twitter?, Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 50 (1) (2013) 1–5.
[112]
Y. Zhao, Y. Guo, X. He, J. Huo, Y. Wu, X. Yang, et al., Assessing Mental Health Signals Among Sexual and Gender Minorities using Twitter Data, in: 2018 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics Workshop (ICHI-W)., Los Alamitos, CA, IEEE Press, 2018, pp. 51–52.

Index Terms

  1. She's Reddit: A source of statistically significant gendered interest information?
        Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

        Recommendations

        Comments

        Please enable JavaScript to view thecomments powered by Disqus.

        Information & Contributors

        Information

        Published In

        cover image Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
        Information Processing and Management: an International Journal  Volume 56, Issue 4
        Jul 2019
        421 pages

        Publisher

        Pergamon Press, Inc.

        United States

        Publication History

        Published: 01 July 2019

        Author Tags

        1. Social web
        2. Reddit
        3. Discussion board
        4. Gender
        5. Interests

        Qualifiers

        • Research-article

        Contributors

        Other Metrics

        Bibliometrics & Citations

        Bibliometrics

        Article Metrics

        • 0
          Total Citations
        • 0
          Total Downloads
        • Downloads (Last 12 months)0
        • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0
        Reflects downloads up to 13 Jan 2025

        Other Metrics

        Citations

        View Options

        View options

        Media

        Figures

        Other

        Tables

        Share

        Share

        Share this Publication link

        Share on social media