Gendered Conversation in a Social Game-Streaming Platform
Table 2: Distribution of users who posted only in female or male channels
['[BOLD] Only Popular Channels', '[BOLD] Female 14,849', '(74%)', '[BOLD] Male 17,168', '(78%)']
We examine whether the selection of which channels to post to is associated with a given gender by calculating, for each user, the percentage of female channels that they posted among all (400) channels. 1,818,028 individual users posted at least one message in at least one of the 400 channels. We narrow it down to 93,898 (5%) active users who have posted at least 100 messages, primarily to obtain reliable language models. Our result suggests strong gender preference in channel selection (see Fig. Note that if choices were random we would expect a binomial distribution with a peak at 50%. By contrast, we see a strong gender divide. A large fraction of users (16%), even when we focus on the users who have posted in more than five channels, have posted only in male or female channels. Moreover, if we limit ourselves to users who have posted in many (10+) channels, a clear peak at 100% — 10 female-channels and 0 male-channels — is visible, indicating that the choice of chat participation is gendered and a significant fraction (8%) of users post messages only in female-streamer channels. Among 93,898 active users, there are 20,185 users and 21,883 users who posted only in female or male channels respectively. Most of these users has posted messages in popular channels (see Table.