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Quantifying gender biases towards politicians on Reddit
Sara Marjanovic1, Karolina Stańczak2, Isabelle Augenstein2
1Copenhagen Center for Social Science Data, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
Plos One
|October 26, 2022
Summary
Online political discussions reveal subtle gender biases against female politicians. While public interest is equal, language used is less professional and respectful, focusing on appearance and personal life, not policy.
Area of Science:
- Computational Social Science
- Political Science
- Gender Studies
- Natural Language Processing
Background:
- Global efforts for gender parity in politics face challenges, often attributed to implicit gender biases against women in leadership roles.
- Previous research has identified various forms of gender bias, but a comprehensive analysis of online political discourse is lacking.
Purpose of the Study:
- To conduct a comprehensive study of gender biases in online political discussions, focusing on Reddit conversations about male and female politicians.
- To investigate linguistic and extra-linguistic cues of bias, including misogynistic language, benevolent sexism, and descriptor attribution differences.
- To evaluate five types of gender bias: coverage, combinatorial, nominal, sentimental, and lexical.
Main Methods:
- Collection of 10 million Reddit comments related to male and female politicians.
- Development and application of automatic gender bias detection techniques.
- Multi-faceted analysis of linguistic and extra-linguistic features across different political leanings.
Main Results:
- Contrary to some prior research, coverage and sentiment analyses indicate equal public interest in female politicians.
- Nominal and lexical analyses reveal that discussions about female politicians are less professional and respectful than those about male politicians.
- Female politicians are disproportionately referred to by their first names and described in relation to their appearance, clothing, or family, unlike male politicians.
Conclusions:
- Online political discourse exhibits subtle, yet significant, gender biases against female politicians, manifesting in less respectful language and focus on personal attributes.
- These biases persist across different political spectrums, though they are most pronounced in far-right online communities.
- The study provides a valuable dataset for future research on gender bias in online political communication.
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