The Female Consumer Response Implications of Male Dominance in a Product's Online Community

Does male dominance in a product's online community deter female community voices? Does it affect product ratings and the nature of content produced? How might female consumers’ brand attitudes and intentions be affected, ultimately? Utilizing a large panel dataset of online customer reviews in the beer industry and three experimental studies, the authors empirically investigated these questions. This product category is highly male dominant, on average, but there is enough significant variation across products to enable degrees of male dominance to be empirically examined. The investigation also empirically considers other theoretical accounts of simple majority, tie strength, homophily, and cultural masculinity. The findings complement prior work on online word of mouth, demonstrating that male dominance in an online community can deter contributions from female reviewers and generate lower rating departure from community average sentiment by female reviewers. Male dominance also affects the type of content generated by female reviewers. A reduction in the evocation of femininity themes occurs, with an increase in the evocation of masculinity themes. Downstream brand attitudes and trial intentions are also affected. Because of high product-community male dominance, consumers have less information when evaluating products.