Women’s Engagement in Political Discussion on Twitter: The Role of Gender Salience, Resources, and Race/Ethnicity

Abstract

Men often dominate political discussion on social media. Our research investigates when women’s political discussion increases to close the gender gap in political discussion. We argue that women’s political discussion will increase when gender is a highly salient political topic. These increases in women’s political discussion will most likely occur among “resource-poor” women and women of color who often lack the conventional resources thought to facilitate political discussion, such as education and income. We analyzed the gendered dynamics of political discussion on Twitter using a novel dataset of tweets spanning a four-year period before and after the 2016 presidential election—a period when gender and women’s issues shifted from having a low level of salience to a high level of salience. We found that women and men engage in political discussion at comparable rates regardless of their resource levels and during periods of high-gender salience and low-gender salience. We also found that both women of color and white women increase their political discussion during times of high-gender salience relative to low-gender salience. Our results show that social media is a platform that can close the gender gap in political discussion between women and men regardless of women’s resource levels or the salience of gender in politics.