https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1912-3639
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ABSTRACT
Despite initial optimism, a gender gap seems to exist in online political engagement. In this article, we focus on online political discussion and show that women use the internet to discuss politics significantly less than men. We propose that this is a ‘new’ gender gap and not a simple reflection of the traditional gender gap in offline political discussion activities. A unique dataset from Germany facilitates an empirical comparison of online and offline political discussion and their explanatory factors. We contend that the online environment imposes additional obstacles to women’s willingness to discuss politics as the result of a hostile environment and distinct socialization patterns. The resulting gap is visible in terms of specific personality traits that women, in comparison to men, require to discuss politics online. Using the ‘Big Five’ personality trait repertory, we show that women that score high on agreeableness are significantly less likely to discuss politics online than men with the same trait. We also find significant differences in the way the personality traits extraversion and openness influence both women’s and men’s participation in online and offline discussion.
Acknowledgements
The authors want to thank Hanna Bäck, the participants in the General Online Research Conference in 2018, and the participants in the Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales Seminar series in 2018, for their helpful comments in earlier versions of the manuscript. The authors also want to thank the two generous reviewers and the editors for their insightful suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 We use wave ‘g’ collected in 2017. Since political discussion measures are available in diverse waves since 2013, we replicated the analyses for all the waves finding no significant differences and confirming the robustness of the results.
2 The GESIS Panel is the first probability-based mixed-mode panel infrastructure in Germany. The reference population for the GESIS Panel is the German-speaking population aged between 18 and 70 years permanently residing in Germany. It is a mixed-mode self-administer survey (online and paper-and-pencil). In 2019, approximately 5,200 panelists had been recruited from a random sample drawn from municipal population registers. We use the dataset version ZA5665_v35-0-0. All details and the data (upon request) are available at https://www.gesis.org/en/gesis-panel/gesis-panel-home/
3 The original answers were ‘No’; ‘Yes, once’; ‘Yes, sometimes’; ‘Yes, often’, however, given their very different distribution, using them as dichotomous variables improves the measurement and the comparison. See Table A3 in the Supplementary File. In any case, we have replicated all the analyses presented here with the original variables and found no significant differences (see Table A4, A5 and Figures S6 to S10 in the Supplementary File)
4 Exact wording is available in Note 1 in the Supplementary File.
5 The dataset also provides information about individuals’ frequency of internet use. Although we might include it as an additional control variable, it implies a threat in terms of endogeneity as individuals might discuss politics less often online because they seldom use the internet, but on the other hand, they might use the internet infrequently for the same reason they do not discuss politics, which is because they do not have time.
6 Descriptive statistics are available in Table A1 in the Supplementary File.
7 Replication with logistics models for each variable provide evidence of the robustness of the main findings (Figures S1-S5 in Supplementary File).
8 Additional tests including interaction terms between occupation and family status and gender provide results supporting the assumption that situational explanations are more useful to understanding gender gaps offline than online (further tests are available from the authors).
9 Furthermore, we computed average marginal effects for each trait on men and women (see Table A6 in the Appendix).
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Notes on contributors
Simone Abendschön
Simone Abendschön is professor of political science at the University of Giessen, Germany. Before that, she has been working as visiting professor of political sociology at the University of Bamberg, and as lecturer at the University of Frankfurt. She received her PhD from the University of Mannheim for her dissertation on the value socialization of young children. Her main research interests encompass (political) socialization, political communication and participation. She is the editor of the volume “Growing into Politics. Contexts and timing of political socialization” and has published in several volumes and international journals [email: [email protected]].
Gema García-Albacete
Gema García-Albacete (PhD Political Science, University of Mannheim 2011) is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences of University Carlos III of Madrid. Her research relates to citizens’ inequalities in political engagement based on age, gender, and/or origin. She has published at the International Journal of Press Politics, West European Politics and the International Journal of Public Opinion, among others. Her work focusing on the gender gap in politics is available at www.genpol.es [email: [email protected]].