How facebook shares preferences of women

Are preference differences between men and ladies attenuated or accentuated in added gender-equal societies? Using the information on the shares of male and female Facebook users that have an interest in over different contents, this column finds that differences are larger in gender-equal societies for interests that are systematically biased towards an equivalent gender across the world ( like football, war, or children), while the contrary is true for interests that do not show a gender bias ( alike as fitness, trip, or horses). These contrasting results are according to both evolutionary psychology and social role theory.

Do preference differences between men and ladies become attenuated or accentuated in additional gender-equal societies? The solution to the present question might sound straightforward equal opportunities and equal access to resources should make men and ladies more alike in their preferences. Still, the solution seems to be more complex. For illustration, the gender gap in engineering is especially large in a number of the world’s most gender-equal countries, similar to Finland and Sweden (Stoet and Geary 2018). Of course, this so-called gender-equivalency paradox needn’t generalise to the planet of preferences, from politics and religiosity to travelling, fitness, and big screen.

There are two theories on the question of gender equality and preference differences between men and ladies. On the one hand, evolutionary psychology posits that gender equality allows everyone to be their true self, so that both women and men can more freely express their innate predispositions. This tends to amplify differences between men and ladies. On the opposite hand, social role theory posits that men and ladies differ in their preferences mostly due to stereotypes, socialisation and discrimination. With gender equivalency removing those stereotypes, the gender gap tends to narrow, making men and ladies more similar in their interests and preferences.

Although these theories point in opposite directions, they have not been mutually exclusive. Evolutionary psychology applies mostly to innate preferences, whereas social role theory applies mostly to preferences that are socially constructed. However, we could test whether both theories could be correct, If we could find how to differentiate between both sorts of preferences. In contrast to utmost studies that have targeted very specific preferences (Falk and Harmle 2018), this can require comprehensive data on a broad set of preferences.

Facebook The world’s largest database on preferences

In a recent paper (Cuevas et al. 2021), we use Facebook’s Marketing application programming interface (API) to urge information on the shares of male and feminine Facebook users that have an interest in several contents, and that we do that for all countries of the planet. For illustration, this tells us how multiple men and the way multiple women have an interest in Lionel Messi in Nigeria, or how multiple men and the way multiple women have an interest in poetry in Bangladesh. Due to the massive number of interests, it covers almost everything, from cuisine, psychology, and romantic comedies to football, family, and organic food.

How does Facebook identify its users’ interests and preferences? Facebook not only observes what you explicitly like, but also what you read, share, and download. And it does so not just on its platform, but also on all of the world’s web pages where it’s a presence. Additionally, Facebook also observes much of your offline activity, as long as it has access to your GPS location. However, visit the pub every night, or attend church on Sundays, If you go jogging a day. Therein sense, Facebook plays the role of the ethnographer, but on a huge scale it peers into the lives of billions of individuals, and it unobtrusively observes what interests them.

When assessing how trustable this information is, it is useful to recollect that Facebook’s business model depends on making correct inferences about its users’ true preferences. This enables Facebook to point out more relevant posts, thus incentivising you to spend longer on the social network. This finally translates into Facebook having the ability to point out more advertisements. As such, Facebook’s nethermost line depends crucially on correctly identifying its users’ true preferences.

Consistent with this, in related work we’ve shown that distances between countries that supported Facebook interests correlate strongly with distances between countries supported surveys that enquire about people’s values, norms, attitudes, and preferences (Obradovich et al. 2020).

Facebook has the extra advantage of taking a bottom-up revealed preferences approach it identifies whatever people find intriguing, instead of what the social scientist who designs surveys might find intriguing. Again, this is often alike to the ethnographer’s approach Facebook observes people set about their day-to-day lives, without forming any prejudices about what is important and what is not.

Gender-related and non-gender-related preferences

With data on interests for men and ladies across the utmost countries of the world, we distinguish between two sorts of interests. We call an interesting gender-related if it exhibits an equivalent gender bias across the world. For illustration, in essentially all countries of the planet, men are more curious about motorcars, tape games, and football, and ladies are more curious about health clubs, romance novels, and youngsters. And that we call an interest non-gender-related if it doesn’t show an equivalent gender bias across the world. For illustration, travelling, horses and eBooks are more prevalent among men in some countries, and more popular among women in other countries.

Embracing this interpretation, our results concur with both theories.

For potentially innate preferences ( i.e. those with an equivalent gender bias everywhere, similar as sports and war), men and ladies are more different in further gender-equal societies. This is often precisely what evolutionary psychology predicts. But for-gender-related interests, similar as travelling, horses, and eBooks, the other holds. This is often precisely what social role theory predicts.

A word of caution is required here. We ask gender-related interests as potentially innate because we will not discard the likelihood that some gender-related interests are socially constructed. Take the illustration of the stronger interest of males in football the planet over. This male bias could be due to hormonal differences that make men more curious about anything to try to do with competition, including football. Therein case, the preference would be innate. Still, it’s also possible that the male love for football was socially constructed in some societies, to also conquer the planet through cultural diffusion. That said, a minimum of a subset of gender-related preferences is likely effectively innate, whereas non-gender-related preferences are possibly not innate.

Gender policy

Do these findings have any policy implications? Policies that reduce barriers and supply equal opportunities to men and ladies are likely to enhance welfare, partly because it allows everyone to measure up to their interests and aims and partly because it results in a far better allocation of talent (Hsieh et al. 2019, Chiplunkar and Goldberg 2021). Lowering fences are good, independently of whether preferences are socially constructed or innate. When it involves more specific policies, almost like gender quotas, the excellence between differing types of preferences becomes more applicable (Bagues and Campa 2017). Still, it might appear desirable to possess as numerous female computer scientists as males, and as numerous male physicians as females, If differences are socially constructed. In contrast, if differences are innate, it becomes less obvious that complete gender equivalency is what we should always pursue.

SOURCE
https://voxeu.org/article/what-facebook-can-tell-us-about-preference-differences-between-women-and-men