Men often dominate political discussion on social media. Our research investigates when women’s political discussion increases to close the gender gap in political discussion. We argue that women’s political discussion will increase when gender is a highly salient political topic. These increases in women’s political discussion will most likely occur among “resource-poor” women and women of color who often lack the conventional resources thought to facilitate political discussion, such as education and income. We analyzed the gendered dynamics of political discussion on Twitter using a novel dataset of tweets spanning a four-year period before and after the 2016 presidential election—a period when gender and women’s issues shifted from having a low level of salience to a high level of salience. We found that women and men engage in political discussion at comparable rates regardless of their resource levels and during periods of high-gender salience and low-gender salience. We also found that both women of color and white women increase their political discussion during times of high-gender salience relative to low-gender salience. Our results show that social media is a platform that can close the gender gap in political discussion between women and men regardless of women’s resource levels or the salience of gender in politics.

男性经常主导社交媒体上的政治讨论。我们的研究调查了女性政治讨论何时增加以缩小政治讨论中的性别差距。我们认为，当性别成为高度突出的政治话题时，女性的政治讨论将会增加。妇女政治讨论的增加很可能发生在“资源匮乏”的妇女和有色人种妇女中，她们往往缺乏被认为促进政治讨论的传统资源，例如教育和收入。我们使用 2016 年总统选举前后四年期间的新颖推文数据集分析了 Twitter 上政治讨论的性别动态——在这段时期，性别和妇女问题从低水平转变为高水平。显着性。我们发现，无论女性和男性的资源水平如何，以及在高性别显着性和低性别显着性时期，女性和男性参与政治讨论的比例相当。我们还发现，相对于低性别显着性而言，有色人种女性和白人女性在性别显着性高的时期都会增加她们的政治讨论。我们的研究结果表明，社交媒体是一个可以缩小男女政治讨论中性别差距的平台，无论妇女的资源水平或性别在政治中的重要性如何。