Men are biased against women on Twitter, according to a new study which has been nosing about on gender wars online, or something like that. The report is partially based on the extremely interesting and simple-to-understand Bechdel test popular movements like Miss Representation have been highlighting lately.
To pass the Bechdel test, a work of fiction like a movie, must have at least two women characters who talk to each other about a subject other than men. You’re probably not surprised to hear that loads of Hollywood flicks fail at this test because they’re mostly centered around male characters.
Bechdel test for Twitter showing men and their bias against women:
David Garcia, researcher at the Chair of Systems Design at ETH Zurich, and his Qatar Computing Research Institute colleagues have knocked together an algorithm which can automatically screen content for its Bechdel score. The team took it further by employing the algorithm to analyze real-life conversations on Twitter. They studied 300 million tweets with 170,000 characters to compute an interaction network.
The results indicated that banter amongst men on Twitter had fewer mentions of women as compared to female users referring to males on the site. Additionally, women were noted to have more conversations involving men than tweets not talking about males. The researchers examined users from the US who shared a link to a particular YouTube movie trailer in June 2013, and those who engaged with these tweeters over a longer period of time.
But such a pattern was not found when analyzing tweets sent by students of both sexes. Fathers were touted to make fewer mentions of women and even interact less with the fairer sex as compared to men without children, for obvious reasons. One thing the study may not have accounted for is whether the ‘biased’ male tweets actually failed to pass the Bechdel test because the tweets examined revolved around trailers which did not clear the test either.
If you want more details on this report about men being biased against women on Twitter, here’s the place to go.