Gender differences in online communication: A case study of Soccer

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Macedo, Mariana, Saxena, Akrati
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Macedo, Mariana
Saxena, Akrati
author_facet Macedo, Mariana
Saxena, Akrati
contents Social media and digital platforms allow us to express our opinions freely and easily to a vast number of people. In this study, we examine whether there are gender-based differences in how communication happens via Twitter in regard to soccer. Soccer is one of the most popular sports, and therefore, on social media, it engages a diverse audience regardless of their technical knowledge. We collected Twitter data for three months (March-June) for English and Portuguese that contains 9.5 million Tweets related to soccer, and only 18.38% tweets were identified as belonging to women, highlighting a possible gender gap already in the number of people who participated actively in this topic. We then conduct a fine-grained text-level and network-level analysis to identify the gender differences that might exist while communicating on Twitter. Our results show that women express their emotions more intensely than men, regardless of the differences in volume. The network generated from Portuguese has lower homophily than English. However, this difference in homophily does not impact how females express their emotions and sentiments, suggesting that these aspects are inherent norms or characteristics of genders. Our study unveils more gaps through qualitative and quantitative analyses, highlighting the importance of examining and reporting gender gaps in online communication to create a more inclusive space where people can openly share their opinions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_11051
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Gender differences in online communication: A case study of Soccer
Macedo, Mariana
Saxena, Akrati
Social and Information Networks
Social media and digital platforms allow us to express our opinions freely and easily to a vast number of people. In this study, we examine whether there are gender-based differences in how communication happens via Twitter in regard to soccer. Soccer is one of the most popular sports, and therefore, on social media, it engages a diverse audience regardless of their technical knowledge. We collected Twitter data for three months (March-June) for English and Portuguese that contains 9.5 million Tweets related to soccer, and only 18.38% tweets were identified as belonging to women, highlighting a possible gender gap already in the number of people who participated actively in this topic. We then conduct a fine-grained text-level and network-level analysis to identify the gender differences that might exist while communicating on Twitter. Our results show that women express their emotions more intensely than men, regardless of the differences in volume. The network generated from Portuguese has lower homophily than English. However, this difference in homophily does not impact how females express their emotions and sentiments, suggesting that these aspects are inherent norms or characteristics of genders. Our study unveils more gaps through qualitative and quantitative analyses, highlighting the importance of examining and reporting gender gaps in online communication to create a more inclusive space where people can openly share their opinions.
title Gender differences in online communication: A case study of Soccer
topic Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.11051