Reviews are one of the examples of User Generated Content (UGC) which are helpful for transparency in markets by sharing information about products which let buyers make their purchasing decisions easily. There are also some biases seen in reviews and surprisingly there was some gender gap seen in reviews too. After analyzing all the reviews on mentioned websites, it was found that women tend to provide higher ratings than men. This gap was consistent in different categories of reviews, different geographic locations and also across different years.
The study also found that even though men and women both frequently rate positively, men were more critical when it comes to reviews than women. Women were most likely to give five stars but men often gave lower ratings. The author of the study, Yaniv Dover, said that when they started collecting data and analyzing different reviews, they thought that women tend to give more negative reviews. It was an interesting misconception that women are more negative because in reality, they are more positive than people think.
Researchers wanted to understand the reason why men were more critical than women so they conducted a lab based study called Studies 2 and 3. For Study 2, the researchers gathered 1100 participants from the US and asked them to rate AI generated paintings. This study was done in a controlled environment and the reason behind this study was to understand how men and women rate products where they could immediately experience and check them. The results of the study showed that there wasn't much difference between private thoughts about paintings among men and women. But when both were asked to leave and review, it was observed that women left less negative reviews than men.
In Study 3, participants were asked to rate musical pieces. The results were still similar to Study 2. Another thing participants were asked in Study 3 was their fear of negative evaluation or disapproval. This question was asked to determine if women leave more positive reviews because they are fearful of negative evaluation. It was found that women indeed have more fear of negative evaluation than men which stops them from leaving a negative review. Social judgements or backlash can discourage women from posting a negative review even if they are not satisfied with the products.
This shows that even if we are checking reviews to buy something, there is a high chance that they are not true. Social media and other websites are full of misinformation. A whole research is needed to be done on this brief study to find out the real reasons of this gender gap in reviews online.
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by Arooj Ahmed via Digital Information World
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