Whose ideas are worth spreading? The representation of women and ethnic groups in TED talks

Lade...
Vorschaubild
Datum
2019
Herausgeber:innen
Autor:innen
Schwemmer, Carsten
Jungkunz, Sebastian
Zeitschriftentitel
ISSN der Zeitschrift
Bandtitel
Verlag
Zusammenfassung

We investigate the representation of women and ethnic groups in TED talks, which reach a large online audience on YouTube with science-related content and topics on societal change. We argue that gaps in representation can create a misleading perception of science and the respective topics discussed in these talks. We validate annotations from an image recognition algorithm for identifying speaker ethnicity and gender to compile a data set of 2333 TED talks and 1.2 million YouTube comments. Findings show that more than half of all talks were given by white male speakers. While the share of women increased over time, it is constantly low for non-white speakers. Topic modelling further shows that the share of talks addressing inequalities which affect both groups is low, but increasing over time. However, talks about inequalities and those given by female speakers receive substantially more negative sentiment on YouTube than others. Our findings highlight the importance of speaker and topic diversity on digital platforms to reduce stereotypes about scientists and science-related content.

Beschreibung
Schlagwörter
Representation \ women \ ethnic groups \ computational social science \ YouTube
Verwandte Ressource
Verwandte Ressource
Zitierform
Schwemmer, C., & Jungkunz, S. (2019). Whose ideas are worth spreading? The representation of women and ethnic groups in TED talks. Political Research Exchange, 1(1), 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/2474736X.2019.1646102
Sammlungen