Abstract
Online platforms are an increasingly popular tool for people to produce,
promote or sell their work. However recent studies indicate that social
disparities and biases present in the real world might transfer to online
platforms and could be exacerbated by seemingly harmless design choices on the
site (e.g., recommendation systems or publicly visible success measures). In
this paper we analyze an exclusive online community of teams of design
professionals called Dribbble and investigate apparent differences in outcomes
by gender. Overall, we find that men produce more work, and are able to show it
to a larger audience thus receiving more likes. Some of this effect can be
explained by the fact that women have different skills and design different
images. Most importantly however, women and men position themselves differently
in the Dribbble community. Our investigation of users' position in the social
network shows that women have more clustered and gender homophilous following
relations, which leads them to have smaller and more closely knit social
networks. Overall, our study demonstrates that looking behind the apparent
patterns of gender inequalities in online markets with the help of social
networks and product differentiation helps us to better understand gender
differences in success and failure.
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