Longitudinal gender and age bias in a prominent amateur new media community

Despite early hopes that the internet would facilitate more socially equitable communication, many age-old forms of discrimination appear to have been preserved. Men are routinely aggressive towards women, experienced users harass newcomers, and young people dominate new social and entertainment media. The current study statistically examines peer scoring and reviewing behavior by over 300,000 users of a prominent new media website over a seven-year period in terms of the gender and age of the users. Findings support previous research on male bias online as well as reveal a complex age hierarchy with gender interactions, which became rather homogeneous over time for all users except older males.