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Is ‘le Redditor ’ a Masculine Noun?

Is ‘le Redditor ’ a Masculine Noun?. Gender, Language, and Reddit. Motivation. Reddit has a pronounced gender imbalance in its user base. The use of language is a powerful social signal.

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Is ‘le Redditor ’ a Masculine Noun?

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  1. Is ‘le Redditor’ a Masculine Noun? Gender, Language, and Reddit

  2. Motivation • Reddit has a pronounced gender imbalance in its user base. • The use of language is a powerful social signal. • Reddit’s lack of universal avatars or personalized profiles means language is the predominantsignal. • What sort of synergy might exist between this signal and Reddit’s voting system? How might the gender imbalance affect this synergy?

  3. Audience • The primary audience is those engaged in online community-building, on both the technical and content fronts. • Knowing how these imbalances are expressed can help in future design. • Secondarily, those who participate within Reddit may be interested in exploring the nature of their community.

  4. Background • There is a general consensus amongst existing research that male and female users tend to utilize language in different ways in online fora. • Previous research into online communities such as World of Warcraft has indicated that a strong male demographic bias can lead to conformation to masculine norms and suppression of behavior traditionally deemed feminine.

  5. Main Questions Addressed • Does the gender imbalance on Reddit result in females using masculinized language in the community at large? • Specifically, using previously-observed differences in the use of determiners (a, the, that), quantifiers (one, two, more, some), and pronouns (I, you, [s]he), is such masculinized language quantifiably detectable?

  6. Analysis • Previous research indicates that gender differences exist in the use of certain language elements. • Used user histories of female posters in /r/BabyBumps and /r/TwoXChromosomes. • For each subreddit, I gathered 10,000 words of users’ posts, gleaned only from default subreddits. Each set consisted of 20 separate users. • Used existing GenderGuesser tool (based on heuristic algorithm) to predict gender for each set.

  7. Results • Posts from /r/BabyBumps users were categorized as weakly feminine according to formal and informal rules. • Posts from /r/TwoXChromosomes were categorized as weakly masculine according to informal rules and weakly feminine according to formal rules. • Observed that TwoXChromosomes users were more likely to post in default subreddits than BabyBumps users.

  8. Conclusions • Based upon weakness of correlation combined with margin of error of the guesser tool, I cannot conclude that female Redditors masculinize their language using the described elements. • The possibility still exists that female Redditors consciously manipulate their language in other ways to sound more masculine. • More study needs to be done in order to identify vocabulary or patterns of speech that might be identified by users as being either masculine or feminine.

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