When Dylan Farrow posted a letter on this blog accusing Woody Allen of sexual assault, female commenters overwhelmingly supported her; male commenters were evenly split.
These were among my findings when I studied nearly a million comments made on The New York Times website. Women and men differ substantially in how they engage with online media. And these differences may have profound implications for media, gender equality, and even our democracy.
Regardless of whether you believe Dylan Farrow’s story, the gender gap in sympathy (which several other studies have found as well) should trouble you. It implies that in Congress, the police, or the military, where women are underrepresented, opinions will be skewed against survivors of sexual assault. (The importance of equal representation applies to men as well, of course: we would not want sexual assault trials to have entirely female jurors.) And because men and women’s opinions differ in many other ways as well, the undemocratic implication is simple: when one gender is underrepresented, the views that are heard will not fairly represent the views that are held.
Women were clearly underrepresented in my data. They made only a quarter of comments, even though their comments got more recommendations from other readers on average. Even when they did speak up, they tended to cluster in stereotypically “female” areas: they were most common on articles about parenting, caring for the old, fashion and dining. (Women got more recommendations than men on most of the sports blogs, but they still made, for example, only 5 percent of comments on the soccer blog.)
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