Architectures of Virtual Decision-Making: The Emergence of Gender Discrimination on a Crowdfunding Website

TL;DR

This study investigates how design choices on a crowdfunding website, specifically publishing recipients' sex, influence gender discrimination, revealing that such design features can significantly amplify systemic bias in online funding behaviors.

Contribution

It demonstrates that publishing recipients' sex on a crowdfunding platform markedly increases gender discrimination, highlighting the impact of design decisions on online bias.

Findings

Gender discrimination was weak before publishing sex information.

Discrimination increased significantly after publishing sex.

Donors discriminated based on structural position and language, not sex itself.

Abstract

The increasing relevance of Internet-based markets requires a sustained investigation into the relationship between design and user behavior. This research begins within the sociology of quantification and markets to investigate the impacts of basic design decisions on user behavior and individual success on a widely used crowdfunding website. This study looks at one common design feature, publishing recipients' sex, on the probability of receiving funding. Following research in the sociology of gender, these effects are defined along individual, behavioral, and structural dimensions. The results reveal that before teachers' sex was published, gender discrimination was weak and inconsistent. However, afterward gender discrimination increases by an order of magnitude and becomes systematized. Contrary to expectation, donors did not discriminate by sex category, but by teachers' structural position and the kinds of language they used. Implications for research on gender discrimination, priming, and online behavior are discussed.