#people ignoring newer content creators' work which discourages them from sharing their creations

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Erasing Voices: The Treatment of Women on YouTube by Tabitha Varvil

When YouTube opened its proverbial doors Valentine’s Day of 2005, no one could have foreseen the success that was to come, nor the dominance it would have as a video platform (Hopkins). Even further from mind, however, was the creation of a new kind of career persona: the YouTuber. Youtube is now known as a video sharing site in which anyone can share their content, gain followers, and even make enough money to convert to YouTube as their primary source of income. Since YouTube has started work with advertisers and sponsors, YouTubers have been on the rise; but it seems like women are not reaping the same benefits as men. Professional YouTubers give the space more direction and shape how and why YouTube will be accessed and utilized in the future. However, the divisive atmosphere of the site creates a space that many women are not comfortable working in. The lack of representation and vitriolic treatment of women on YouTube inhibits their success, discourages other women from joining, and is altogether harmful to reaching equality for women.

YouTube’s trending page is an excellent example of the problem of representation that women face, but could easily be overlooked by many viewers. Excluding branded content (videos created by advertisers to promote a specific product or their brand as a whole), only 13 of the top 50 trending videos came from female owned channels (recorded April 2nd, 2018 at approximately 12:30 a.m.). Though some male YouTubers feature women on their videos in addition to themselves, only 15 women are present in the video thumbnails1 (“Add Video Thumbnails - YouTube Help”). With just 30% of YouTube’s top promoted videos featuring women, a lack of female representation on the site is clear and immediately recognizable.

This concept of female underrepresentation on YouTube is not new, and those speaking out about it range from scholars to YouTubers themselves. A 2013 article entitled Youtube's Most-Viewed Videos: Where the Girls Aren't aimed to examine exactly why women were not appearing on YouTube’s homepage. In the article, Mary Tucker-McLaughlin, Associate Professor in the School of Communication at East Carolina University, found that less women created content for the platform than men, therefore decreasing their visibility (46). However, the issue of female representation on the site is not that simple, as she also found that a great deal of women showed interest in creating content suitable for a platform like YouTube, whether that be vlogs, short films, or sketches. As of 2018, YouTube does not have public statistics detailing its male-to-female creator demographics; nevertheless, the reasons that women are not joining or are not staying afloat are more indicative of YouTube’s representation problem than the mere male/female ratio. As Tucker-McLaughlin notes, “Women need to challenge the existing voices in this technological conversation and enter this realm as equals” (47). Five years later, this sentiment continues and is becoming increasingly relevant as more and more women speak out about their treatment while creating content for the Youtube community.With over 1,000,000 video results including the phrase “gender discrimination on YouTube”, it is clear that women do not lack representation merely because they have no interest in having their voices be heard on the platform (YouTube).

A repression of voices do not start and end within the YouTube community; instead, the gender disparities on YouTube mirror workplaces across the country. Numerous studies have analyzed the environment which women experience online, all research concluding that women are treated far more harshly than their male counterparts operating on the same platforms (Barak 77-92; Biber et al. 38; Herring et al. 371-383; Ratliff). Women in media offline also find themselves the target of criticism more often than their male coworkers, and are often seen as being less capable and credible (Newsom). But it is not just their work that is criticized; appearance of women in the workplace is frequently a motivator for comments, with a sexual undertone being innately present (Barak 87). When women go to work in male dominated industries there is a heightened sense of discomfort due to the excessive misogyny they face. The S.T.E.M. (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields are the most typical workplaces targeted when there are discussions of this issue, but gender-based discrimination and inequity extends its reach far beyond S.T.E.M. industries. Women in almost every position of every field experience, at a minimum, microaggressions solely based on their gender (Molyneaux 8). As they continue to enroll in every imaginable place of work it is easy to see that YouTube’s hostile attitude towards women is not going to prevent them from working; which means instead of warning women about misogyny in order to dissuade them from logging on, actions must be taken to curb this sexist culture.

As the platform expands, YouTubers must stay hypervigilant in their video creation and marketing strategies in order to stay relevant and continue making a profit from their work. The longer someone remains on the platform, the more likely their channel will fall out of relevancy as their fan base ages or is drawn away to newer channels. Despite this, there are creators who have been able to see steady growth on their channels, even as they increase in their years of service. One such YouTuber who illustrates this concept is Jenna Mourey, a creator who founded her channel February 13th, 2010, and rose to popularity on July 9th, 2010, after publishing her parody video How to trick people into thinking you’re good looking (YouTube). In May of 2013 Mourey, known on YouTube as Jenna Marbles, had nearly nine million subscribers (Wotanis). March 25th of 2018, she reached a new milestone; eighteen million subscribers, double that of her standings five years ago. According to SocialBlade, a live-view statistics and analytics tracker for social media websites, within the same amount of time as Mourey, Ryan Higa (username: Nigahiga) had gone from eight million to twenty million subscribers, yet had amassed almost one billion more total views.

Because of her continued popularity, Mourey is seen as the exception to female driven content, yet the reactions to her work remain the same. When her content was studied by Wotanis in 2013, she was challenging status quo by targeting society’s gender divide, making parodies entitled “What Girls and Guys Do” (Mourey). This garnered her lots of hate comments, many of which targeted her in sexually explicit ways, critiquing not just her performance and comedy, but also focusing a great deal on her looks. Though she handled them well (typically through a dismissive joke) and shifted her content to focus on things outside of the gender binary, she continues to receive the same kinds of comments (Wotanis). In a recent video entitled Reacting to People Who Have Smashed or Passed Me, Mourey watches and comments on other creators videos in which they discuss whether they would “smash” (have sex with) or “pass” (not have sex with) her. The videos also tend to include crude commentary on what influenced their choices, most of the influences being appearance based as well. Although she handles these videos with tact and humor, there is something unsettling about strangers speaking so explicitly about Mourey without her prior consent or perceived knowledge. Mourey is not the only female

YouTuber that is analyzed by the “smash or pass” rating either, as the list typically consists of the female YouTubers who are currently most popular -- and though there are male versions of this smash or pass game, uploads within that category far under-weigh that of the female smash or pass editions. Being evaluated for one’s looks over one’s talents leads many women to simply not share their videos, let alone work to advertise themselves, considering the more popular the female YouTuber is, the more likely they will be featured in a video. Women’s images are used to attract views to someone who is ultimately going to sexualize them, and potentially tarnish their name.

Higa, on the other hand, continues his steady popularity without the addition of ever having to deal with such an outpouring of hateful comments similar to those received by Mourey and countless other female creators. Those rude comments that he does occasionally attract tend to be based off of offending someone’s sensibilities, and are typically more critical in a content- based sense than on his appearance or in a sexual fashion. While Mourey is the recipient of a bulk of hate comments (approximately 9% of her total comments) that read similarly to “This is why ignorant whores like you belong in the fucking kitchen,” Higa receives only 2% hateful comments, that read along the lines of “this is not funny at all” (Wotanis). This clear separation of comment content is what makes YouTube so dangerous and damaging to women, yet such behavior has continued past 2013 and into 2018. Both creators have been on a steady path since then: either you start as a female and receive objectifying hate comments your whole YouTube career, or you start as a male and receive a more proportional hate to regular comment ratio. This disparity causes not only viewership loss, but monetary loss. As channels are subject to “surveillance, judgment, and evaluation”, potential ad revenue is lost on those channels that are not so frequently promoted (Banet-Weiser, 288). And the channels that get the most promotion and thus recognition are male, creating a loop in which female content creators are mostly unable to break. Women are blocked from success as men discourage women from joining by making the space threatening with their continued dominance and hateful comments.

There are solutions to creating representation, but difficulty arises when men feel threatened by the assumption that their control of the platform will be lost.To begin with, if female YouTubers were able to see themselves through the eyes of YouTube and the advertisers they would like to appeal to, they could garner a better understanding of their intended market, and shift their content accordingly. However, analytics companies like OpenSlate make transparency of ad data more difficult to reach, as their closed door policy only opens for corporations intent on paying them money to access the demographics and promotional rankings of YouTubers (Johnson). Thus, female YouTubers are unable to see or assess the ways in which advertiser discrimination affects them, which ultimately loses them money and inhibits growth if their brand is not “to the standard” of their male counterparts.Though it is easy to assume that opening up these sorts of analytics companies would help, the biases specifically against women would still be prevalent. Even if OpenSlate allowed for these women to access their rankings and adjust their channels accordingly, it is the culture, not the company, that creates a system in which women are not credited for the work that they do.

This is where solutions become more difficult, because they mirror the rest of corporate America’s trite solution: create a more equal workplace with the help of men. This sounds simple enough in theory; all you need is male YouTubers willing to feature or promote female content creators on their channels, therefore elevating the women to an equal standing, and perhaps even teaching hateful commenters that there’s no need for malice -- but this idea is flawed as there is potential for men to not view this as an equalizer, but as a shift from male domination to female.

If men began elevating the work of women, there is a possibility that their viewership would decrease, especially if their viewers believe the female counterpart to be more entertaining. That fear, not fact, is what motivates them to keep women’s voices suppressed and increase their unwillingness to make original content for the platform. Not only do women feel uncomfortable within the current YouTube environment, few women want to join in, afraid to encounter more of the blatant misogyny and hate that they are used to seeing and experiencing online (Tucker- McLaughlin, 46). If more women do not join the community, then men will continue to exercise their control of it, and widen the gap of success between male and female creators.

It is not a woman’s duty to make a space for herself online. However, she must first know that the environment that she is coming into will cause a traumatic experience. YouTube needs better regulation of their comment sections and an easier way for creators to control the comments that the will view. Other social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr already employ a function that blocks key phrases that the user requests censorship for. Similarly to the report spam function, this would help keep inappropriate criticisms out of the public eye, at least until they were moderated by the YouTuber or division at YouTube created to specifically vett these occurrences. This would not only help women creating or viewing content on YouTube, but also YouTube’s increasingly child-focused market. Just like YouTube’s already in-effect “flag for inappropriate content” button, comments could also go under review (Blattberg). To make this more efficient, it would also benefit YouTube to better outline what they deem as unacceptable behavior, as their current guidelines allow for a lot of material to slip through, and even be promoted;for example, when popular YouTuber Logan Paul recorded a dead body, and the video was made more viral through being added to the trending page. The trending page itself should also be constantly monitored, as it is perhaps the most condensed and therefore easy hub of videos to oversee. With these improvements, and constant attention to what can be improved, YouTube could set the standard for women’s equality in online workplaces.

Annotated Bibliography

“Add Video Thumbnails - YouTube Help.” YouTube, Google, 2018, support.google.com/youtube/answer/72431?hl=en.

Banet-Weiser, Sarah. “15 Branding the Post-Feminist Self: Girls’ Video Production and YouTube Sarah Banet-Weiser 277.” Mediated Girlhoods, 2011, pp. 277–294., doi:10.3726/978-1-4539-0128-1/21.

Barak, Azy. “Sexual Harassment on the Internet.” Social Science Computer Review, vol. 23, no. 1, 1 Feb. 2005, pp. 77–92., doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0894439304271540.

Biber, Jodi K., et al. “Sexual Harassment in Online Communications: Effects of Gender and Discourse Medium.” CyberPsychology & Behavior, vol. 5, no. 1, 5 July 2004, pp. 33–42., doi:10.1089/109493102753685863.

Blattberg, Eric, et al. “The Demographics of YouTube, in 5 Charts.” Digiday, Digiday, 2 Mar. 2018, digiday.com/media/demographics-youtube-5-charts/.

Though this article was short, it made great use of charts to express male and female demographics on YouTube. It pulls on statistics and direct examples of creators that fit within those categories, which makes it more personalized and comprehensible; basically, giving a name to the numbers. Though I don’t intend on using much, if any, information from this article, it shows a varied list of resources and places from which it gathered its information. For me, the charts themselves were very useful in visually presenting the information, and I am keen on replicating their effect in my paper, with newer statistics.

Chyan, Yang, et al. "Predicting the Determinants of Users' Intentions for Using Youtube to Share Video: Moderating Gender Effects." Cyberpsychology, Behavior & Social Networking, vol. 13, no. 2, Apr. 2010, pp. 141-152. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1089/cyber.2009.0105.

In this article, three facets of YouTube creation, sharing, and reception are explored, primarily the influence the TAM has on user’s intentions, social influence on user intentions, and users choosing and sharing videos based on gender. I focused specifically on the sections speaking about moderating gender effects, and found it predominantly focused on the profitability of using gender as a tool on YouTube. Though one can be inclined to view this article as cynical, I thought it was very useful, as it is the business end of the interpretation of gender on YouTube. It demonstrates the view in which advertisers see YouTube, and thus points out the faults of both YouTube and the industry itself in its biases towards women. This also gives a better understanding as to why men are presented so many more profitable opportunities through the platform and the name they make for themselves/ outside forces make for them.

Herring, Susan, et al. “Searching for Safety Online: Managing ‘Trolling’ in a Feminist Forum.” The Information Society, vol. 18, no. 5, 2011, pp. 371–384., doi: 10.1080/01972240290108186.

Hopkins, Jim. “Surprise! There's A Third YouTube Co-Founder.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 11 Oct. 2006, usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-10-11-youtube- karim_x.htm.

Hoskins, Deb. ""DO YOU YOUTUBE?" USING ONLINE VIDEO IN WOMEN'S STUDIES COURSES." Feminist Collections, vol. 30, no. 2, 2009, pp. 15-17, ProQuest, http://proxy.emerson.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest- com.proxy.emerson.edu/docview/221213779?accountid=10735.

Hoskins article is written with an instructor audience in mind, walking through how YouTube videos can have positive applications within the classroom -- specifically in women’s studies courses. Though this article is not focused on the gender divide, it makes multiple mentions of difficulties encountered while trying to find female representation when most feminist search terms and keywords result in horribly misogynistic video results. Even though this article is not directly trying to express commentary on this issue, it does in fact show that even when people are actively looking for female-driven content, it can be overrun with results that give the exact opposite. The mere fact that this article needs to give tips and tricks as to how to access woman driven content shows how the platform itself should also be held responsible for the number of women being held back from achieving success. In that way this is somewhat of a primary source on how difficult it is to even intentionally find female based content. 

Johnson, Lauren. “This Social Video Analytics Company Has Quadrupled Its Auditing Business Since YouTube's Brand-Safety Scare.” – Adweek, Adweek, 7 Sept. 2017, www.adweek.com/digital/this-social-video-analytics-company-has-quadrupled-its- auditing-business-since-youtubes-brand-safety-scare/.

With growing concerns for advertisers as to what videos their ads are appearing on, and how those demographics of viewership affect their brand, this article focuses on a specific video analytics company that only shows data to companies, and more specifically companies who pay to request access to the information they gather. Originally I wanted to use this company as a source of my statistics, but found the fact that it required payment an inexcusable offense, especially since I am one person and not a brand who is trying to gain information. I decided to research how brands interact with OpenSlate instead, and found this article. It seems that this platform is the most comprehensive in analytics, from gender to age group to saved cookies, yet YouTubers, especially those trying to break into the industry, don’t have access to the information it allows. Though this doesn’t necessarily have much gendered information within it, I believe that restricting access has a large impact on YouTubers. For my paper, I wanted to point out this unfairness: how can a YouTuber combat the gender divide when they are being discriminated against through gendered factors of which they are not allowed to see.

Molyneaux, Heather, et al. "Exploring the gender divide on YouTube: An analysis of the creation and reception of vlogs." American Communication Journal 10.2 (2008): 1-14.

This 2008 study takes a look at the metrics used in weighing vlogs created by male and female YouTubers. It addresses quantitative information the most: length of video, viewership, subscribers, camera resolution; and qualitative: setting, subject, and audio quality. Since its date of publication, YouTube, especially vlogs, have evolved far beyond sitting in front of the camera and talking about your day. However, this is valuable to me as it shows growth in both communities and gives context about the history of the male and female divide on YouTube, even if it is just approaching it through one genre.

Mourey, Jenna. “Playlists.” YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/user/JennaMarbles/playlists. Mourey, Jenna. "Reacting to People Who Have Smashed or Passed Me." YouTube, Uploaded by JennaMarbles, 16 Feb 2017, https://youtu.be/m0ttpozYW14

Newsom, Jennifer Siebel, director. Miss Representation. 2011. Ratliff, Clancy. “Attracting Readers: Sex and Audience in the Blogosphere.” The Scholar & Feminist Online, vol. 5, no. 2, 2007, pp. 1–4.

Robertson, Mark R. “How To View & Analyze YouTube Statistics For Any YouTube Video.”Tubular Insights, Tubular Insights & Tubular Labs Inc., 21 Feb. 2017, tubularinsights.com/youtube-statistics-competition/.

In this online article, Robertson shows how to access YouTube statistics on any video as well as what all of the numbers that are garnered mean. It then explains how someone in competition with that YouTuber may elevate their own stats. Though this article was originally published in 2010, it has been updated for every big change YouTube has made to statistics access. I found this article to be useful as an introduction to the statistics I wanted to include, especially since I am not a YouTuber and have not had to encounter YouTube stats for my own use before. This article was able to give me a reasonable look at what I should expect to analyze in my paper. In turn, I was able to comprehend it for myself as well as have a better understanding of how to share it with my readers, since too much data can frequently be overwhelming.

Tucker-McLaughlin, Mary. "Youtube's Most-Viewed Videos: Where the Girls Aren't." Women & Language, vol. 36, no. 1, Spring 2013, pp. 43-49. EBSCOhost, proxy.emerson.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ap h&AN=88790294&site=ehost-live.

In Tucker-McLaughlin’s article, she discusses the creators and content of YouTube’s most viewed videos (at the date of her analysis). Though dated now, many of the top contributors have remained on top, and the discussion of how YouTube’s algorithm or lack thereof, is still a widely debated topic among frustrated creators. This article makes use of YouTube’s own statistics and creators in order to try to understand why women are not consistently found in the most-viewed videos. For my paper I mostly intend on countering the attitude the author takes up on why women are not being represented, both in a historical perspective and in an almost checking-in to see the difference between then and now sort of way.

Wotanis, Lindsey, and Laurie McMillan. "Performing gender on YouTube: How Jenna Marbles negotiates a hostile online environment." Feminist Media Studies 14.6 (2014): 912-928. 

In Performing Gender on YouTube: How Jenna Marbles negotiates a hostile online environment, Wotanis and McMillan compare and contrast YouTubers Jenna Marbles and Nigahiga, exploring what factors lead to the different experiences, reactions, and opportunities they encounter. Unlike other articles approaching the gender divide online, this one takes into account how the YouTube job market parallels much of what women face in what would be considered “regular jobs”. I found this to be one of my greatest sources, as it tackled not only the methodology of how to quantitatively snapshot information found through statistics, but also how to go about analyzing the numbers found -- both through the isolated YouTube world and the rest of the job market/media industry outside of it. I believe it’s specificity and ability to then broaden the subject gives it more credibility and offers me a good template of how to properly convey my findings and penultimate message.