YouTube made the call to hide “dislikes,” or downvotes, from videos in 2021. Women creators have been benefitting ever since.
Marita Freiman, a PhD candidate at Belgian university KU Leuven, published a report earlier this month on the positive ripple effects of this small modification – her broader focus being the exploration of how gender-biased feedback affects workers’ productivity in an online labor market.
For the study, Freiman analyzed a cross-section of trending YouTube videos published by over 2,000 channels in the U.S. and Canada between August 2020 to October 2022, with more than 600 of those channels belonging to women. The “dislikes” were logged both before and after the platform’s design change took effect on Nov. 10, 2021, which resulted in concealing information on “dislikes” to the public. During the process, she also chronicled each video’s title, description, comments and view count.
Freiman found, through this work, that women’s YouTube videos had a 57% decrease in negative feedback following YouTube’s design change. Prior to the shift, women would receive 43% more downvotes from YouTube users than male creators. The viewership of women’s videos rose by 15.5% per month following the change, too.
“My results document a gender gap in feedback on YouTube: Female content creators receive significantly more negative feedback, but removal of public dislikes eliminates this gap,” Freiman wrote. “My additional analyses show that the closure of the gender feedback gap coincides with a significant increase in the productivity of female content creators and in the demand for their content.”
Indeed, the uptick in engagement, in tandem with the decrease in negative gender-based feedback, led women to publish more – 8.4% more than before the redesign, to be exact. Better still, this increase translated into more money for women, with them seeing an increase between $193 and $3,100 in monthly revenue paid based on view counts.
Freiman’s more troubling findings are consistent with similar research efforts into gender representation gaps and general sexism on social media. Examinations of the rise of news influencers show that men outnumber women in this realm by 33%. An analysis by the Economist Intelligence Unit, meanwhile, found that 85% of 4,500 women surveyed around the world have experienced or witnessed online abuse.
Another study published this year by the University College London and University of Kent, meanwhile, found a four-fold increase in the level of misogynistic content served to TikTok users’ “For You” pages – another small tweak with its own far-reaching effects. This “micro-dosing on highly toxic content is leading to the saturation of extremist misogynistic ideas among young people,” the researchers stated in that report.
Though they may seem like insignificant shifts to some, making even minor tweaks to features on social media platforms can help turn the tide, Freiman’s data suggests. “The findings show that it is possible to eliminate gender-biased feedback through design changes, and that this leads to positive supply and demand effects,” she concludes. “This indicates that other user-generated content platforms could benefit from adopting similar policies.”
