Gender and identity construction on YouTube

Watching videos is one of the most widespread entertainment habits among young Europeans, with YouTube rising as the queen of online platforms, used by 90% of 12-15 year-olds (Haddon & Livingstone, 2012), who mainly consume humorous videos and content related to video games (Mascheroni & Ófalsson, 2014).

Pre-adolescence and adolescence are the stages in which the platform shows greater success, coinciding with a key moment in the development of individuality and relevant decision-making for the future. This makes teens and pre-teens more susceptible to the influence of the environment when it comes to constructing their identity (Aran-Ramspott et al., 2018). YouTube constitutes an enabling environment for subjectivation as it is configured as a space for interaction and collaboration that coordinates collective creativity as a generator of meaning (Sánchez-Olmos & Hidalgo-Marí, 2016).

In this context, the mediating figures branch out into subjectivation and new forms of expression are configured, resulting in the promotion of new opportunities for the construction of the subject, thus placing the referents in these spaces in the focus of interest. At the same time, we must understand these opportunities in a context characterised by the convergence of the media and the socio-economic, political and cultural reality of the young people who participate on the platform, within which they are also subject to a gender socialisation.

Socialisation and education instill an ideal that situates the subject in the symbolic, the language and the available schemes of cultural intelligibility (Lacan, 1977), configuring a norm of conduct (Butler, 2010). Power forms the subject, provides it with the condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire; in such a way that submission consists precisely of dependence on a discourse that is not chosen but paradoxically initiates and sustains the existence of the individual (Foucault, 1994). Therefore, socialisation and access to goods, actions and rights, among other issues (Ficoseco, 2016), inevitably determine gender power relations, as well as the role that women play on the platform, despite no existing explicit conditions.

The studies that have analysed the platform from a gender perspective manifest the appropriation of the environment and the unequal presence of identities. The lack of feminine referents between the figures of greater reach on the platform is evident (Wotanis & McMillan, 2014); as well as masculine domination characterised by sexism, visible in comments received by the female YouTubers that do not conform to the expectations of gender (Döring & Mohseni, 2018). Along with the conditioning of content according to gender, there is an imbalance in the production and reception of videos and a more active participation of men (Molyneaux et al., 2008; Sánchez-Olmos & Hidalgo-Marí, 2016), despite the greater effort that women invest in the quality of interactions (Pierson, 2015).

Gender does not seem to be a conditioning factor to be part of the platform. However, no research has been found that concludes equal participation, which reveals the traces of a participatory gap (Jenkins, 2009).

Media education for full and critical participation

In this media setting, where YouTube occupies a prominent place among young people, critical media literacy is necessary (Buckingham, 2007; French et al., 2019; Gutiérrez, 2008; Jenkins, 2009; Jenkins et al., 2015) as an essential competence for the 21st century.

Dussel (2017) points out the vital necessity to tackle what circulates in YouTube and other networks in school, analysing with students how to produce and how to look at images, to contribute to the expansion of their worlds, and to help them become accustomed to other images and production methods. To this end, it is essential to address this learning process from a critical, reflexive and creative approach (Gutiérrez, 2008), breaking and confronting gender stereotypes. It is about preparing young people to read and write media (Buckingham, 2007), addressing the dual role of producers and consumers (Jenkins, 2009), so that they actively participate in digital culture and take advantage of the potential of YouTube as a space for social (Gutiérrez, 2008) and gender equality.

It is necessary to deepen their experiences with media outside the classroom (Buckingham, 2007; Dussel, 2017) and to understand critically and profoundly how forms of media work, how they communicate and intervene in relationships, how they represent the world and how they are produced and used (Buckingham, 2019). In this context, we should consider the participatory gap (Jenkins, 2009; Robles-Morales et al., 2016), which refers to inequality in access to media and opportunities to participate fully. Examining this gap from a gender perspective requires concern for the situation of women in this scenario, as well as consideration of their way of behaving on the web — a behaviour that implies ethical values.

The ethical challenge (Jenkins, 2009) focuses on the importance of the school context and refers to the learning of ethical norms during the online experience. Furthermore, it relates to issues of netiquette and digital identity management, since practices with Web 2.0 technologies, even if they are for fun and entertainment purposes, are important in the construction of one's own identity (Jenkins, 2010). In the education of prosumers, users who participate and give feedback on the web, it is fundamental to instill respect and empathy, topics that are often forgotten although research reveals them as factors related to the low participation of women (Macharia, 2015). These topics must be taken into consideration to create democratic participation spaces.

Sampling unit: YouTubers’ profiles

For data collection, a list of the 50 largest accounts was created. For this purpose, we selected those accounts that as of August 1st, 2019, housed the largest number of total views in their videos and the highest number of subscribers (Burgess & Green, 2018). This list was delimited in accordance with the situation and age group in which this study is framed: adolescents in the Spanish context. The following criteria were considered: the YouTube channel a) is located in Spain; b) generates content in one of the official languages of the country; c) does not generate children's content; d) shows an Instagram account — the second most used platform in the age group (Mascheroni & Ófalsson, 2014) — in the YouTube profile; e) shared its last video in the last 5 months; and f) received its last comment in the last 5 months.

The resulting list was ordered according to a variable generated from the normalisation of the variables "views" and "subscribers", establishing a ranking that considers the reach capacity of the 50 accounts that comprise the list. Furthermore, the genre expressed by the creators and the type of content generated was added. Table 1 includes the ten accounts with the greatest reach. The complete list made it possible to ascertain the presence of women among the main referents, as well as their scope and content.

Sampling unit: audience profiles

YouTube’s data policy makes it possible to see the channels followed by an account, but not the subscribers of that given channel. Due to this policy, Instagram was the platform chosen for the exploration of the audience. Furthermore, Van-Dijck (2016) highlights the importance of cross-platform interconnection (media convergence) as it allows for greater visibility and maximum presence. In this respect, Instagram is the platform preferred by young people after YouTube (Mascheroni & Ófalsson, 2014), which justifies our methodological decision.

Using the free software R, a loop was created, represented in Figure 1 (https://bit.ly/2OeUF8e), which performs a Web Scraping procedure with each of the accounts that constitute the initial list. This technique allowed us to extract a large amount of information from websites, obtaining public data accessible to anyone.

For this study, a process was programmed to go to the Instagram profiles subject to examination, click on the “followers” tab and extract the names of between 40,000 and 50,000 users, through a simple indiscriminate sampling: the program randomly chose the profiles that represent the sample, whereby any profile of the audience was equally eligible.

According to the proposed objectives, we sought to determine the gender of the people who make up the YouTubers’ audience, their preferences regarding content and the genre of the channel. As Thelwall (2018) points out, this information can be inferred from the names obtained from Instagram with the Web Scraping technique, which can be compared to the Continuous Register Statistic as of January 1, 2017, published by the National Statistics Institute of Spain. Here, the names registered in the Spanish context and the prevalence of the name concerning each gender can be found. If the frequency of a name in one of the groups (feminine or masculine) was one hundred times greater than the frequency associated with the same name in the opposite group, the association of said name with the gender of the first group was accepted. If this was not the case, the name was categorised as neutral and was eliminated because it did not provide relevant information.

After comparing the sample with the Register, an average of 15,000 users was obtained for each profile, defined as female or male; whereby a confidence level of 95% and an error of 1% is achieved with a sample size of 9,603 for the account with the greatest number of followers. A total sample of n=904,939 analysed names was collected (Table 1).

The Web-based Scraping methodology facilitates access to and management of an enormous amount of data. There is no bias in its selection as it is performed under a simple random sampling, which provides a comprehensive view of the YouTube audience in terms of gender. This technique, based on the analysis of social networks using the software R, finds its limitations in the impossibility of locating profiles not easily identifiable with feminine or masculine names, an issue to which the assumption of a binary perspective of gender is added. Besides, we do assume a certain bias as it resorts to a second social network (Instagram) to recover the subscribers of each YouTube channel.

Female YouTubers: presence of women who create and produce content

Among the 50 YouTube accounts considered to have the largest reach, there are a total of 4 female YouTubers, compared to 41 male YouTubers. Furthermore, there are 2 accounts shared by a woman and a man, and 3 accounts linked to mass-media and institutions such as football clubs.

The first five accounts correspond to VEGETTA777, elrubiusOMG, TheWillyrex, Willyrex and AuronPlay, channels whose main content is related to video games or entertainment linked to humour. All of them are managed by men, who appear as the creators and image of their content. In the case of VEGETTA777 and elrubiusOMG, their reach positions them on the international scene (Figure 2: https://bit.ly/2rxQrzO).

The first woman to appear in the ranking is ExpCaseros (ranked 13th), an account shared by a woman and a man who generate entertainment linked to experiments and do-it-yourself (DIY) tutorials. The next woman to appear on the list (ranked 27th) does so under this same condition, together with a man, generating entertainment content and draw-my-life videos (TikTak Draw).

The female creators of content who manage to be in the list of 50 accounts represent 12.2% of the total number of visible physical persons. Moreover, none of them manages to reach the top 10, meaning that the female gender has a notoriously inferior reach. These women create content such as entertainment, sports, beauty or gameplay, while male creators create content that includes entertainment, sports or gameplay.

It is evident that the contents related to female gender stereotypes are less valued among those that have a greater reach, as they rank starting from the 28th position; while content stereotyped as "masculine" or "neutral" holds the most privileged positions, although these positions are not occupied by the women who generate it.

In the overall list, gameplay is the type of content best valued by the YouTube community, produced by 54% of the accounts. Gameplay is also the best positioned, as it is the primary category of content in 8 of the top 10 accounts with the greatest reach. In contrast, women gamers (2) rank 33rd and 49th.

When it comes to sport-related content, only one female YouTuber enters the list and is the best-positioned woman among the women that generate content alone (28th position). She mainly shares content concerning aerobic exercises, the titles of which frequently include the word “adelgazar” (lose weight). The gender stereotype is also reproduced in the content linked to beauty, with no male YouTubers sharing this type of content and with only one woman entering the list and ranking 48th.

The relationship between gender and the audiences of the most far-reaching YouTube channels

The audience builds its gender identity through mediation with female and male YouTubers. It is noteworthy, therefore, that the sample studied is made up of 74.1% men and 25.9% women. In this regard, Figure 3 (https://bit.ly/35HxrNX) illustrates the breakdown of YouTube channels according to the gender of their audience, taking the content into account. Most YouTubers have a mostly male audience.

There are few accounts (6) of greater reach that gather an audience of more than 50% women, and, among these, the most valued content is created by an account with sports tutorials focused on losing weight (Gymvirtual) and by an account focused on makeup (LizyP). This means that the content that impacts the female audience to a greater extent is subject to the reproduction and perpetuation of beauty norms. Music content is the next most important content category, as the official account of Adexe and Nau, two Spanish male teenage singers, has an audience of 82% women.

The accounts closest to reaching a gender balance among their audiences are the shared accounts managed by a woman and a man, followed by mass-media channels, whose content is plural and cannot be linked to a stereotype.

As can be seen in Figure 3, most of the YouTube channels examined in this study have a largely male audience that consumes content related to gameplay and entertainment. Female creators of this type of content also have mostly male audiences, but they are lower down the list due to the domination of male creators. Patty Dragona has 14% female subscribers and Sarinha 15%.

Women who create content linked to the female gender stereotype get greater recognition from the female audience. The content and its link to gender stereotypes present a greater influence than the gender expressed by the content creator. However, the channels that obtain the most balanced audiences in terms of women and men are those in which the two genders are expressed by the creators, that is to say, accounts shared between a man and a woman who create neutral content in terms of gender stereotypes (entertainment linked to humour).