Online Seminar Talk

Estimating Digital Gender Gaps in China Using Sina Weibo Audience Estimates

Ole Hexel
Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography, October 26, 2021

Ole Hexel from the Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography provided original data on the demographic characteristics of users of Sina Weibo, a Chinese-language Twitter-like platform with 521 million monthly average users in 2020.

Abstract

Ole Hexel and his colleagues provided original data on the demographic characteristics of users of Sina Weibo, a Chinese-language Twitter-like platform with 521 million monthly average users (MAUs) and 225 million daily average users (DAUs) in 2020. Sina Weibo users are rarely studied and previous studies have relied on collecting public profile data from a small subset of the user population at the national or provincial level. He provided data on the entire user population and at a greater spatial resolution, using audience estimates provided to potential advertisers. He found that women are overrepresented among Sina Weibo users, especially in locations with (comparatively) low sex ratios, high education levels, and large populations. He and his colleagues explored the reasons for this differential participation by exploiting geographical variation.

About

Ole is a Research Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. He works on gender gaps on social media, resource concentration within kinship networks, and intergenerational financial transfers.