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Does Gender Determine Twitter Content?

Who is more apt to tweet about money? Men? Women? How about marriage? Who tweets more about dinner and/or movies? Does a Twitter member’s gender determine the content of their tweets? In short, ...
Does Gender Determine Twitter Content?
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  • Who is more apt to tweet about money? Men? Women? How about marriage? Who tweets more about dinner and/or movies? Does a Twitter member’s gender determine the content of their tweets? In short, no, but there are recognizable patterns that do show trends among males and females in relation to Twitter.

    Over at Tweetolife.com, the topic of gender and Twitter was studied extensively, and some of the results might surprise you. Before we go down that road, here’s a little bit of information about Tweetolife’s methodology. Their findings are based on a study of over one million tweets (PDF) posted between November 2009 until February 2010. The tweets were separated into gender classifications, which was based on the first name of the Twitter user. That’s fine for all the Rebeccas and Barbaras and Michaels and Stevens of the world, but one would think gender-ambiguous names like Riley, Pat and Kelly could pose a categorization issue.

    Anyway, their about page explains further:

    In the gender differences section, you can see which phrases are used more often by males or females. These results are given under the “Compare” tab. We also looked at the co-occurrence statistics of phrases, seperately for the two genders. That allows us to take a phrase like “cup” and see what else males (or females) talk about they mention “cup” in their tweets in a distinctive fashion (with respect to the other gender).

    While I’m sure the methods used by Tweetolife are an interesting read, but the results of their study are what drives this post. So, do women or men talk about marriage and divorce more? Let’s see what their Gender Differences results tell us:

    Gender Tweets

    Surprisingly, both men and women talk about marriage equally, while divorce is more discussed by women (53 percent to 47 percent for men). Apparently, women on Twitter are fed up with their deadbeat husbands. Anyway, now for something a little less emotional. How about dinner and movie, if, for nothing else, being the date-night constant. Again, the results, especially the word “movie” are a little surprising:

    Gender Tweets

    According to these results, women use the words “dinner” and “movie” more than their male counterparts. I guess this means women are doing most of the planning in regards to these events now? Am I inferring the data incorrectly?

    Another fun comparison is with the obvious choice, sex and love. Let’s see what the results say with this comparison:

    Gender Tweets

    Women rule the roost here, too; although, I’m not sure what I’ve just learned. Perhaps women are more apt to discuss such things on Twitter than men are. Maybe men save their sex talk for more controllable environments? Any guesses here are welcomed.

    Finally, I had to give the men a victory here, so I compared the words “football” and “money.”

    Gender Tweets

    No surprises here, except for that fact there aren’t more women discussing finances on Twitter. If sex and love are open-for-discussion categories, you’d think money would be too.

    What are some other comparisons you’d make on Tweetolife’s utility? Let us know in the comments.

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