Men still outnumber women in comments

Men still outnumber women as online commenters on media sites. At least, the evidence suggests that.

The Times of London recently reported that while 32 percent of its subscribers are female only 23 percent of its commenters are female. (Of course, some women use male pseudonyms.) Men also comment more frequently. Just under 19 percent of Times comments appear to come from women.


The Times' Rose Wild writes:

"Our visitors confirmed a theory I’ve long held about writers to the letters page, which is that women comment on subjects they know about. One said she always did research before posting, and that the time this took was a deterrent. All agreed that if they held back it was because they did not feel well-enough informed, or were too busy. Shyness and a fear of confrontation and ridicule were also important." (Registration required to access this story.)

Research about New York Times commenters found that only 28 percent of names which could be identified were identifiable as female (Pierson, 2015), although Pierson estimates that more women than men remain anonymous. The comments from women received more recommendations than comments from men, and women tended to comment on different topics. Likewise, a cross-national study found higher rates of male commenters at news sites in Denmark, Australia, the UK and the U.S. (Martin, 2015).

Sources

Martin, F. (2015). Getting my two cents worth in: Access, interaction, participation and social inclusion in online news commenting. International Symposium on Online Journalism, 5(1), 80-102.

Pierson, E. (2015). Outnumbered but well-spoken: Female commenters in the New York Times. CSCW '15 Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing, 1201-1213.