One of the recent Nobel Prizes in Economics was awarded to Harvard economist Prof. Claudia Goldin for her research on gender differences in the labor market. Throughout her career, Goldin studied the gender pay gap, its drivers, and women's participation in the labor market. Goldin's work highlights the importance of understanding how gender roles, societal expectations, and economic opportunities shape behavior and decision-making within economic systems.
As marketing science researchers who study digital platforms and acknowledge the importance of these platforms and their impact on economic and social aspects of society, we were inspired by Goldin's findings and realized that similar factors could underly the widely-used digital platforms that profoundly affect people's daily lives. We, therefore, set out to study gender differences in one of the most important forms of user-generated content on digital platforms: online reviews. Online reviews are made for people to share their opinions and impressions of products, services, and almost everything else, online. Originally, the purpose of introducing online reviews was to reduce information asymmetry, empower consumers by making credible and relevant information accessible, and improve economic systems and welfare. And indeed, online reviews significantly impact businesses and economic systems. However, this free flow of information, which was not easily accessible before digital platforms were prevalent, strongly depends on the motivation and willingness of people to share both their positive and negative opinions so that others may be better informed. This form of "self-selection" could be crucial to how representable and credible the shared information is. If we learned anything from Goldin's work, it is that behavioral motivations differ between women and men, and these differences may have implications on how men and women participate in economic systems, in general, or in our case, how they share information online. This is precisely what we set out to study in our Nature Human Behavior paper called "The Gender Rating Gap in Online Reviews."
Echoing Goldin's research on the 'gender pay gap,' we introduce the 'gender rating gap.' Studying more than one billion data records across multiple online platforms, we find that the average star rating submitted by users who identify as female or are likely to be female is significantly higher than the average star rating submitted by users who identify as male or are likely to be male. We further explored where this rating gap might come from and, using a series of experiments, we demonstrate a gender-specific selection of writing an online review that is probably at the core of the gender rating gap: Women who are dissatisfied with their experience are less likely than men to share their opinion online. By contrast, when satisfied, men and women are about equally likely to share online reviews. We provide evidence indicating that women's reluctance to express negative opinions is likely due to women's fear of societal backlash.
In the paper itself, we further discuss how the gender rating gap differs across years, categories, countries, and users' age and propose potential avenues that can assist in attenuating the gap.
An interdisciplinary, gender-balanced, and cross-cultural collaboration
During his postdoc in quantitative marketing in Israel, Andreas, who previously worked on topics related to Influencer Marketing (published in Journal of Marketing), suggested studying gender differences in online reviews in datasets that he had already started collecting at the beginning of his PhD at the University of Mannheim (Germany) in 2017. The set of authors of this paper seemed to be, from the start, a good fit for providing insight into this topic.
Yaniv Dover published multiple papers on online reviews in outlets such as the American Economic Review or the Journal of Consumer Research, where, for example, he finds that the environment (such as the weather) at the time of the review submission, completely unrelated to the actual experience, influences the provision of online reviews. In other words, online reviews can be susceptible to a priori unexpected psychological factors.
Hila Riemer is a researcher in Consumer Psychology who focuses on emotion and identity and has published in various marketing and psychology journals such as Psychological Review, Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Advertising, Current Psychology, and Cognition and Emotion. Hila provided the necessary skills to perform lab studies and to elucidate sociocultural influences on consumers.
Danny Shapira played a crucial role as an expert in social influence, which is at the base of how online reviews affect people. Danny studied this in similar contexts related to how users interact on social media platforms and published his work in multiple papers in the Journal of Marketing Research, the Journal of Marketing and Marketing Science.
Why a gender rating gap in online review is relevant
One could have thought that in an online context, users are rather anonymous. Thus, in front of their screens, societal pressures such as deeply rooted gender roles should perhaps play less of a role. However, we find this is not the case. Women seem to be wary of negative evaluations and adhere to behaving according to sociocultural expectations. This is true for online reviews but could also be true for user-generated content on digital platforms in general. This inherent bias should worry platform managers, businesses, consumers, or anyone else using such information, as we all want the information to be credible, relevant, and representative.
What is next?
Lastly, striving for a society that promotes equal opportunities and gender representation, our finding that women are more hesitant than men to express their views online, especially when dissatisfied, is concerning. It suggests that the conditions in the sociocultural environment may not be sufficiently safe for women to speak up freely, which affects us all as a society. Identifying these biases and their roots is the first step. To take action is next.
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