Do men and women differ in the capability of weaving online social networks: A perspective of gender stereotype activation

Abstract

This study aims to identify the gender difference in online social networks by comparing the condition that gender label is manifest and gender stereotype can be activated easily, with the condition under which gender is concealed and the activation of stereotype is difficult. The data about the follower-followee networks from 15,118 individual users and 5933 institutional users in Sina Weibo, a popular local social networking service, was used to compare the gender difference. The findings of this study tell a significantly different story with the prior gender studies regarding the disparity of social networks between genders. The higher degree centrality and lower closeness centrality of males demonstrates that males are more likely to enjoy a central position in both the immediate neighborhood and the entire virtual community. The higher betweenness centrality of males suggests that people depend more on males to make connections with other people, therefore males are more powerful than females in “controlling” the formation of ties between random pairs of users. However, females can increase the likelihood of forming a social tie and building up the whole network structure. Furthermore, people prefer to make an online social tie with those who have different gender with self.

Keywords

• Gender
• Social networks
• Stereotype activation