Social media gives the potential for people to freely communicate regardless of their status. In practice, social categories like gender may still bias online communication, replicating offline disparities. In the paper Twitter’s Glass Ceiling: The Effect of Perceived Gender on Online Visibility we study over 94,000 Twitter users to investigate the association between perceived gender and measures of online visibility. We find that users perceived as female experience a ‘glass ceiling’, similar to the barrier women face in attaining higher positions in companies. Being perceived as female is associated with more visibility for users in lower quartiles of visibility, but the opposite is true for the most visible users where being perceived male is strongly associated with more visibility. Our analysis suggest that gender presented in social media profiles likely frame interactions as well as perpetuates old inequalities online.
Paper on ‘Twitter’s Glass Ceiling’ Presented at ICWSM 2016
