# Why Do Men Get More Attention? Exploring Factors Behind Success in an Online Design Community

## TL;DR

This study investigates gender disparities in an online design community, revealing that men tend to produce more work, reach larger audiences, and have different social network structures than women, influenced by social positioning and network effects.

## Contribution

The paper uncovers how social network positioning and product differentiation contribute to gender disparities in online creative communities, offering insights beyond surface-level observations.

## Key findings

- Men produce more work and receive more likes.
- Women have more clustered, gender-homophilous social networks.
- Gender differences are partly explained by social positioning and network effects.

## 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.