Women Less Likely To Talk About Politics Online

Women are more likely to be hesitant in expressing their opinions about politics online than men, a new survey by Statista Consumer Insights has found. This was the case in all of the 21 countries polled, with the gender gap narrowest in Finland at 3 percentage points (22 percent male, 19 percent female) and widest in Mexico at 10 percentage points (26 percent male, 15 percent female). This mirrors wider patterns of gender roles and equality in society, with Finland having scored in the top three places in this year’s Global Gender Gap Index by the World Economic Forum.

Even aside from gender, the degree to which people express their views on politics online varies greatly by country. For example, in China only 13 percent of respondents on average said they had expressed their opinion about politics online in the past month. This includes having commented on or even liked a post related to politics on social media. In Japan (not shown on this chart), the figure was even lower at just 5 percent (7 percent men, 3 percent women). At the other end of the spectrum comes South Africa, where 32 percent of respondents said they had expressed their political opinion in the past four weeks (37 percent men, 27 percent women).

Looking at data on respondents having expressed themselves on other topics in the past month, men were more willing to comment on some topics while women are more willing to comment on others. Topics with a more equal ratio of men to women expressing opinions in the U.S. included music (37 percent to 36 percent, men to women) and movies/series (30 percent each).

With regard to the sphere of political discussion, online literature offers various insights and reasons for the gendered pattern. For example, one study notes that “women are less likely than men to participate in political deliberation because they were socialized to avoid these discussions or because they were, for a long time, restricted from political spaces in general.”

Meanwhile, another study found that where men are more likely than women to report commenting for corrective or information giving reasons, women are more likely than men to report reading comments in order to gauge the public’s opinions.