Women are less prone to share their dissatisfaction online than men

In a new study published in Nature Human Behaviour by Andreas Bayerl, Assistant Professor in marketing at Erasmus School of Economics, the gender rating gap is introduced: women’s average online review ratings are higher than those of men. This is due to a difference in men’s and women’s likelihood of sharing online satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

Fear of negative evaluation and potential backlash

The paper reveals how men and women differ concerning sharing their opinions through publicly available online reviews and star ratings. The study, evaluating 1.2 billion data points from five different platforms, introduces the gender rating gap: on average, women's online review ratings are higher than men's by around 0.1 stars. The suggested underlying explanation is that women are less prone to share their dissatisfaction online than men.

Bayerl and his co-authors Yaniv Dover (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and Hila Riemer and Danny Shapira (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) argue that this is due to women’s fear of negative evaluation and potential backlash when voicing their negative opinions online.

The free flow of information

Online reviews allow people to share their opinions and impressions of products, services, employers, and almost everything else online. Before making a decision more than 90% of people read and incorporate information from online reviews into their decision-making processes. As such, inherent biases that might exist on online review platforms should worry consumers, platform managers, businesses, or anyone else using such information, as we all want the information to be credible, relevant, and representative.

Today, the impact of online reviews extends even further. AI tools such as ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on vast amounts of internet data. These findings raise questions about the extent to which the gender rating gap might introduce gender biases into LLMs – or even amplify existing online biases.

Exploring the gender rating gap

The authors used a multi-method approach combining real-world field data and data from controlled lab settings. The researchers used computer- and AI-aided methods to infer the gender from reviewers' usernames or profile pictures. In addition, online lab studies were conducted.

The first stage of the study establishes whether the gender rating gap is consistent across platforms. Here, the researchers accessed observational data from the field, namely 1.2 billion actual online reviews published between 1996 and 2024 from several online review platforms. The authors find that there is a gender rating gap. On average, women's online review ratings are higher by 0.1 stars than men's.

This, however, is not because women like everything more and have better experiences. Instead, Bayerl and his co-authors found a gender-specific selection effect. They conducted two controlled online surveys with around 3,000 participants where respondents had to share their genuine attitude towards several products and decide whether they would share a publicly available online review. When satisfied, both men and women are equally likely to share an online review. However, when dissatisfied, women are less likely than men to share their views online. The authors argue that this is due to a fear of negative evaluation and potential backlash when voicing their negative opinions online.

Even on the relatively anonymous Internet, societal pressures such as deeply rooted gender roles play a role. Women seem wary of negative evaluations and behave according to sociocultural expectations. This is true for online reviews but could also be true for user-generated content on digital platforms in general. In other words, women's average rating is higher than men's because dissatisfied women tend to drop out from sharing their critical voice online.

A first step

Striving for a society that promotes equal opportunities and gender representation, Bayerl’s finding that women are more hesitant than men to express their views online, mainly when dissatisfied, is concerning. It suggests that the conditions in the socio-cultural environment may not be sufficiently safe for women to speak up freely, which affects us all as a society. Recognising these biases is a first step towards creating a safer digital environment for diverse voices; the next involves concrete actions – from platform regulations to promoting inclusive practices.