BEHIND THE MILLION PLAYS: GENDER DIFFERENCES IN CREATOR INFLUENCE ON CHINESE SHORT-VIDEO PLATFORMS
Keywords:
Short-video platforms, Creator economy, Gender inequality, Platform labor, Interaction-diffusion, Effort-reward conversionAbstract
This paper examines gender differences in creator influence on Chinese short-video platforms using creator-video micro-data from Chanmama and Douyin. The analysis treats platform influence as an interaction-diffusion process shaped by account resources, content categories, creator tiers, and creative effort. The results show that the average female coefficient is negative but not uniformly significant after controlling for account size and video characteristics. Gender differences are instead conditional: they are concentrated in humanities and social sciences content, among tail creators, and in the weaker conversion of recent publishing effort into likes, comments, and composite interaction-diffusion outcomes. The findings indicate that gender inequality on short-video platforms is not only an outcome gap but also a process-level return gap in the transformation of comparable creative inputs into platform interaction.References
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