BBC Trending has analysed Twitter activity in the run up to the UK election, and have discovered that three-times as many men as women are tweeting about the general election.
The study searched popular hashtags of the main parties, and found that 75% of the political party tweets in Britain were from males, and 25% from females. This data must be considered as fallible to margins of error, as any Computer Scientist will know, due to variables that influence results but cannot be accounted for. In this case, Twitter uses an algorithm to determine gender based on tweet topics, if a gender is not selected by the user, and there may also be a skew in the sense that there are more men on Twitter than women in the UK overall, perhaps making the percentages less shocking.
The most overwhelmingly male hashtag belonged to the Liberal Democrats, who were also the only party to comment on the results, saying that women are crucial to their election efforts. The parties with the highest proportion of female participation were the Green Party, and the Scottish National Party, closely followed by Labour. The Green Party had the most balanced participation rate, with 6-% of Twitter users being read as male and 40% as women.
HSPS applicants should investigate why the more socially liberal parties have an increased participation from women, and whether or not the female leadership of some of these parties influence the openness of support from men and women.
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