Slashdot Mirror
Men Are Sabotaging The Online Reviews Of TV Shows Aimed At Women (fivethirtyeight.com)
FiveThirtyEight has an interesting article today which accuses men of sabotaging the online reviews of TV shows aimed at women. The publication cites an example of "Sex and the City", a show which apparently won plenty of awards and ran for many years on TV, getting hammered by males on IMDb. Compared to women, who amounted to 60% of the people who rated the show with an average of 8.1, men gave it a 5.8 rating. It's not an isolated case, FiveThirtyEight says, citing several other instances where the male audience has downvoted shows aimed at women audience. From the article: The shows with the largest proportion of male raters are mostly sports, video game web series, science fiction and cartoons. The programs with the highest proportion of female voters are -- at least the American ones -- mostly from The CW and Freeform, the new name of the network previously called ABC Family. This list is pretty hilarious. Beyond the top 25, shown in the table above, male-dominated shows of note include: "Blue Mountain State" (92 percent male), "Batman: Beyond" (91 percent), "Batman: The Animated Series" (90 percent), "The Shield" (90 percent), "Ballers" (90 percent), "Justice League" (90 percent), and "The League" (88 percent). "Star Trek: Enterprise" is the most male-heavy of the various official live-action Trek enterprises, while "Battlestar Galactica" still managed to grab 15 percent of its ratings from women, which is somewhat shocking. For women, other skewed programming includes "Private Practice" (71 percent female), "Gossip Girl" and "Gilmore Girls" (67 percent each), "Grey's Anatomy" (60 percent), "Scandal" (60 percent), and "One Tree Hill" (59 percent).
Still - women don't seem to feel the need to go trash-talk shows that are designed to appeal to men. (See the figure entitled: "Men are more likely to give the crappiest rating").
TFA brings up some good points:
There are significantly more men rater stain women rates, which means their results will skew ratings towards what men like to watch
A poor rating does not mean it is bad TV nor does a high one mean it is good
The rating in and off itself is pretty much useless, a better idea is to look at the data to get a clearer picture if a show might be of interest to you
IMDB could separate mens scores from women's; as well as show what shows were highly or poorly rated by the same people who rated a particular show. That would give you a better idea of the value of a rating in deciding if you might be interested in the show.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I'm too lazy to read the article so I'll wildly speculate in grand Slashdot tradition. Did the authors investigate why that's happening? I could imagine at least a few non-nefarious causes:
Maybe men are more likely to vote against a show they dislike than women are, so as many women dislike "Blue Mountain State" as men dislike "Private Practice" but they don't bother downvoting it.
Maybe men are more likely to watch shows they dislike with their partners than women are (and this is certainly true in my house). I'll sit through shows I don't care for because I'm not all that picky and I'd rather spend time with her watching Grey's Anatomy than doing other stuff. The converse isn't true: she isn't likely to sit through COPS with me. I'm more likely to have an opinion and vote on her shows than she is mine because I've seen more of hers.
As a variant of the last one, maybe women generally feel that they have less spare time around the house to watch TV. In households where routine chores are "women's work", the male resident might put in more screen hours than the female who has laundry and cooking and only has time to watch the shows she really cares about. (Note: I am not saying laundry and cooking are women's responsibility, just that lots of households divide work that way, and I think probably enough to sway the numbers.)
Yes, I'm sure there are dumbasses who routinely vote down female-centric shows (as defined by the study) just to be jerks. I'd stake money that there are plenty of women who would go down the list of male-centric shows and vote them down, too: "Batman? Dumb. The Shield? Dumb. Star Trek? Dumb." But are there enough to make a difference, or is it more likely the effect of different TV viewing and/or Internet poll taking habits between the sexes?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
There's a movie site called Cinemaclock. One of the things I like is that it shows the ratings in a table divided among gender and age ranges. Then I can look and see, if it was liked by men in my age range I'll probably enjoy it too.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
I think you've identified the real cause of this data. Only someone with a victim complex would interpret this as "men sabotaging women's shows". Men simply watch way more television aimed at women due to them defining that as quality time.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Why ask for reviews, then question why men are reviewing women's shows? How would you expect to get the opinion of the audience if you exclude half the viewers?
The more interesting question is why more women don't review shows aimed at men.
An even more interesting question is why anyone would bother watching the crap that fills the gaps between commercials anyway?
TV viewing skews heavily female. Check out TV by the numbers some time for gender skews for popular shows. Unless its sports, or fox's sunday nite lineup, men don't watch much tv at all.
The following link from 2010 has a breakdown and its pretty sobering.
http://whiskeys-place.blogspot...
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
Recently I did a lot of reading on toy preferences for children. Monkey studies even got involved, as were efforts to no bias the child one way or another beforehand.
The outcome? Girls actually like a 50-50 split, on average, between 'girl' toys like dolls and 'boy' toys like model trucks. Boys are basically 100% involved in 'boy' toys.
Extend this to media like movies and TV shows. Thinking back, mom enjoyed the same movies the males in my family enjoyed. But she also enjoyed the 'girly' shows we didn't.
It could be that media that women's interests are wider, on average, or that an equivalent zone for men to the 'chick flic' hasn't been discovered. I don't know.
I don't read AC A human right
It's junk food for the SJW agenda and anyone interested in benefiting from it. Men (the least likely to benefit from any modern social justice agenda) are acutely aware of this and develop appropriate opinions.
See, this worries the fuck out of me and is why I'll give time to this so-called agenda even though it riles me too - because since when have we become so fucking selfish that any other group trying to improve their lot immediately means we have to fight it? Maybe we should recognise imbalances (even if they are in our favour) and help to right them?
Not really; a lot of men are forced (under penalty of no sex) to watch their wife's shows, while men don't play the same game. That means men get stuck watching crap they don't like while women do not. Men, then, vent by reviewing the crap they have to watch, hoping that their voices will be heard and the experience will improve for them. Women, not being forced into watching men's shows, don't do this.
And yes, if you are going to force me into something, I am going to throw my weight around to make the situation more favorable for me.
Fortunately, my wife and i enjoy the same shows, pretty much across the board, and respect each other enough to not force each other to watch what we don't like, so we don't have that issue. My wife is not most women, though, and I am not most men, so I'm not speaking from personal experience, but simply relaying experiences shared with me by my other married friends. And if you don't want to take my word for it, fine, don't; read the rest of the discussion on this topic for a couple hundred other examples.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.