Abstract
Gender homophily, or the preference for interaction with individuals of the same gender, has been observed in many contexts, especially during childhood and adolescence. In this study we investigate such phenomenon by analyzing the interactions of the ∼10 million users of Tuenti, a Spanish social networking service popular among teenagers. In dyadic relationships we find evidence of higher gender homophily for women. We also observe a preference of users with more friends to connect to the opposite gender. A particularly marked gender difference emerges in signing up for the social networking service and adding the first friends, and in the interactions by means of wall messages. In these contexts we find evidence of a strong homophily for women, and little or no homophily for men. By examining the gender composition of triangle motifs, we observe a marked tendency of users to group into gender homogeneous clusters, with a particularly high number of male-only triangles. We show that age plays an important role in this context, with a tendency to higher homophily for young teenagers in both dyadic and triadic relationships. Our findings have implications for addressing gender gap issues, understanding adolescent online behavior and technology adoption, and modeling social networks.
Highlights
Is the tendency of individuals to interact preferentially with similar others
We study the influence of gender homophily on building users’ online social environment, by examining differences in how men and women start their online social experience and how they organize their personal social network
While in the previous section we have focused on the first steps of a user in joining the social networking platform and adding the first friends, we take a wider view on gender preferences in adding friends and interacting with them in the social networking service
Summary
Is the tendency of individuals to interact preferentially with similar others. The extent of its influence on human behavior is following roughly the aforementioned order according to McPherson et al [ ]. Gender is one of the most important human attributes which plays an important role during the entire life span [ ], and gender homophily has been largely documented in literature, especially for childhood and adolescence [ ]. The emergence of social networking sites (SNSs) allows to observe the extent of homophily from a computational social science perspective, bypassing possible biases induced by surveys or small and limited samples while getting evidence from digital traces of millions of users. This can lead to complement findings from traditional survey-based studies with evidence from a large portion of the population.
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