This tiny design tweak made YouTube a more palatable place for women creators

It doesn’t take a genius to know that it’s hard to be a woman on the internet. From the sexism that mirrors women’s offline experiences to the objectification that’s part and parcel of being online, the environment for women is challenging at best.

But a new study shows that even small tweaks can make the web a more civil place for women content creators. A team led by University of Zurich postdoc Marita Freimane studied the impact of removing the public display of dislikes on YouTube videos, discovering that when they were hidden from public view, women received less negative feedback. The result? They produced 8.4% more videos, and saw demand for their content rise by 15.5%.

The findings suggest that hatred against women is driven in some way by tribal pile-ons, rather than actual dislike of the content they produce—or, indeed, their very existence.

Before the YouTube policy change, introduced in November 2021, women YouTube creators saw 43% more dislikes on their videos than their male counterparts, according to the videos analyzed by Freimane. “There is a stark difference in the number of dislikes that the content by female content creators gets compared to the content by male content creators,” she says, noting, however, that when the scale of how much users disliked any video was hidden, the animus toward women’s content dissipated. In fact, women creators saw a 57% drop in negative feedback on their videos as a result.

Freimane believes that tiny tweak totally nullified the gender gap in video perception, noting that she saw the weaponizing of video dislikes as a method trolls use to assail creators. “Dislike attacks are a form of harassment, where people—seeing how many other people dislike a video—also choose to dislike it,” she says. “They coordinate, using this dislike count as a coordination device.”

The findings have implications beyond YouTube. “This paper essentially shows how platform affordances and platform policies can shape behavior,” says Carolina Are, a researcher at the Centre for Digital Citizens at Northumbria University. Are points out that tools such as likes and dislikes can often be deployed by platforms for a positive reason—for instance to let users know which videos are and are not worth their time—but can quickly be misused.

“[The tools] were probably originally born to teach the platform what people like and don’t like, and to help users curate a better online experience,” says Are. “But they can definitely be weaponized against creators, particularly if they’re from marginalized demographics.”

The policy change is important because it encourages female creators to produce more content. Freimane’s analysis suggests the average woman produced an extra video every two months as a result of the change, which could net the average woman creator an extra $3,100 in YouTube revenue per month.

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