Gender differences in the climate change communication on Twitter

Introduction

Social media in general and Twitter in particularly provide new venues and research opportunities for computational social sciences as researchers can mine tweets for public opinions and attitudes, social activities and networks and trends in conversations and information sharing patterns. Social media may even have an important role in creating public opinions about different issues as it has been discovered to be a very efficient medium to spread ideas and news (Jansen et al., 2009; Cha et al., 2012) and to engage people in environmental activism (Cheong and Lee, 2010). Online campaigns have been found to have offline impacts, as was the case with for instance the Twitter campaign connected to Earth Hour in 2009 during which a connection between activity related to the campaign on Twitter and reduced energy consumption was detected (Cheong and Lee, 2010). On the other hand, data mined from social media may provide insights into public perceptions and opinions about various topics, such as climate change (Auer et al., 2014; Kirilenko and Stepchenkova, 2014). Environmental issues, climate change and global warming are hotly debated topics on many forums, social media none the least. In this paper, we focus on Tweets about climate change and in particular gender differences (and similarities) in the climate change debate between male and female tweeters. Our results have implications for organizations interested in targeting male and female stakeholders and customers via Twitter, as well as for other researchers using tweets and retweets as their data source.

Literature review

Climate change is something that many of us are in some way concerned about, but in general, women have been found to be more concerned about climate change than men and possessing greater scientific knowledge about the issue, in the context of American public (McCright, 2010). This is related to a more general tendency of women being more concerned about local environmental issues than men are. In addition, women tend to be more willing to take voluntary actions to mitigate climate change, such as trying to reduce greenhouse emissions, while men “are more willing to support government policies to impose public sacrifices in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions” (O’Connor et al., 1999). These results indicate that women are more concerned about...