Categorizing the non-categorical: the challenges of
studying gendered phenomena online

Categorizing the non-categorical: the challenges of
studying gendered phenomena online

gender, affordances, attention, amplification, gender disparities.

Studies of gendered phenomena online have highlighted important disparities, such as who is likely to be elevated as an expert or face gender-
based harassment. This research, however, typically relies upon inferring user gender—an act that perpetuates notions of gender as an easily

observable, binary construct. Motivated by work in gender and queer studies, we therefore compare common approaches to gender inference
in the context of online settings. We demonstrate that gender inference can have downstream consequences when studying gender inequities
and find that nonbinary users are consistently likely to be misgendered or overlooked in analysis. In bringing a theoretical focus to this common
methodological task, our contribution is in problematizing common measures of gender, encouraging researchers to think critically about what
these constructs can and cannot capture, and calling for more research explicitly focused on gendered experiences beyond a binary.

Sarah Shugars 1,�, Alexi Quintana-Mathe � 2

, Robin Lange2

, David Lazer2,3,4,5

https://doi.org/10.1093/jcmc/zmad053

Oxford University Press on behalf of International Communication Association.

4 December 2023

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