Gender Biases in Online Communication: A Case Study of Soccer

Macedo, Mariana and Saxena, Akrati (2025) Gender Biases in Online Communication: A Case Study of Soccer. Applied Intelligence. ISSN 0924-669X (In Press)

Abstract

Social media and digital platforms allow us to freely and easily express our opinions to a wide audience. In this study, we investigate gender-based differences in online communication, specifically on Twitter (now X), in the context of soccer, by analyzing patterns of participation, sentiment, and engagement across male and female users. As one of the most popular sports, soccer engages a diverse audience on social media, regardless of expertise. We collected 9.5 million tweets related to soccer in English and Portuguese during three months (March - June 2022). Only 18.38\% tweets were identified as written by women, highlighting a possible gender gap already in the number of people who participated actively in this topic. We analyze tweets in Portuguese and English, as these languages represent different perspectives on soccer. English serves as a proxy for global discussions, while Portuguese reflects more localized but deeply engaged communities. We observe that women and men communicate more between each other in Portuguese than in English, exhibiting lower homophily within their social networks. However, this difference in homophily does not appear to influence how women and men express emotions and sentiments, suggesting that these aspects may be shaped by other factors such as societal expectations, gender role socialization, online community dynamics, visibility constraints, or other gender-related norms and characteristics. Women express their emotions more intensely in response to events than men, regardless of the differences in the number of tweets, and men tend to be more negative in their tweets than women. Our study reveals persistent gender gaps across both weeks and hours through qualitative and quantitative analyses, including detailed text-level and network-level examinations. These findings underscore the importance of identifying and reporting gender disparities in online communication to foster more inclusive spaces where individuals can freely express their opinions.

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