Abstract
Does male dominance of a product’s online community deter female community voices? Does it affect product ratings and the nature of content produced too? 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, these questions are empirically investigated. This product category is highly male dominant, on average, but there is significant variation across products to enable degrees of male dominance to be empirically examined. Other theoretical accounts of simple majority, tie-strength, homophily, and cultural masculinity are empirically considered as well. The findings serve to complement prior work on online word of mouth (OWOM), demonstrating that male dominance of an online community can deter contributions from female reviewers and generate lower rating departure from community average sentiment by female reviewers. The type of content that is generated by female reviewers is also affected, with a reduction in the evocation of femininity themes and an increase in the evocation of masculinity themes. Downstream brand attitudes and trial intentions are also impacted. A resulting implication of high product community male dominance is the availability of less information for consumers when evaluating products.