Title: Gender Bias in Sharenting: Both Men and Women Mention Sons More Often Than Daughters on Social Media,
Abstract: Gender inequality starts before birth. Parents tend to prefer boys over
girls, which is manifested in reproductive behavior, marital life, and parents'
pastimes and investments in their children. While social media and sharing
information about children (so-called "sharenting") have become an integral
part of parenthood, it is not well-known if and how gender preference shapes
online behavior of users. In this paper, we investigate public mentions of
daughters and sons on social media. We use data from a popular social
networking site on public posts from 635,665 users. We find that both men and
women mention sons more often than daughters in their posts. We also find that
posts featuring sons get more "likes" on average. Our results indicate that
girls are underrepresented in parents' digital narratives about their children.
This gender imbalance may send a message that girls are less important than
boys, or that they deserve less attention, thus reinforcing gender inequality.