Mingyue Zha ’27 and quantitative social sciences professor Herbert Chang ’18 won a top paper award from the International Communication Association for their research on online gender inequalities. This summer, the two travelled to Copenhagen, Denmark to present the paper on the international stage. Their work analyzed over 45,000 YouTube videos and six million comments using game theory and network analysis to look at gaps in the online gaming community. The Dartmouth spoke with Zha about the project.
How did you first get involved in research with Professor Chang?
MZ: I had met Professor Chang at one of the open houses during Orientation Week. He talked about how the Russian oligarchy stowed their investments away overseas, and he used network analysis to uncover all the economic ties. That information had been used in testimonies to inform how sanctions should be applied. His use of research to have tangible global, geopolitical consequences was fascinating. I had a conversation with him afterwards, and he picked up on my enthusiasm and interest.
Tell me more about the premise of your project.
MZ: The project that I came to is studying gender inequalities in online content creator collaborations. Online content creation is becoming a larger industry, and a lot of this content is through collaborations, where two content creators create a piece of production together. We were interested because it’s something that nobody has studied before. What are the gender inequalities and dynamics of such interactions? We studied this specifically in gaming communities, because they have a lot of gender inequities. Who is able to play and be visible in these spaces is determined on a gender basis.
What was the methodology you used for this project?
MZ: We used YouTube videos of gaming content creators across genres, and then we applied a mathematical model of shapely value to calculate how much each individual contributes to the increase in viewership of a collaboration. When attributing that to genders, we can see whether one gender in the community has a bigger impact on the increase in viewership over another gender. That’s how we quantify whether one gender is perceived as more valuable in the community.
We compared across these genres and found that in male dominated games, male streamers had a larger influence on the increased leadership and also collaborated with each other more. There is in-group, gatekeeping dynamics within genders, and the same is for female-dominant games.
What would you say was the most challenging part of the whole project?
MZ: The most challenging part was the technical aspect. I came into Dartmouth without a computational background, so I learned all of it from scratch. Professor Chang provided me with resources and built those skills for me from the ground up. Within the first couple of months, I learned all the data analysis techniques from him. With computational social science work, a lot of it is seeing where the findings take you, rather than coming in with a preconceived hypothesis.
How did you become interested in this topic?
MZ: My personal motivation is that I watch a lot of gaming content in my free time. I’m a woman who’s invested in this space, so investigating gender inequities was really interesting to me. I knew that it could inform how people think about content creation, and also had broader impacts on how we study social media interactions.
What was it like to travel internationally to present your work?
MZ: It was my first time presenting a research paper ever and having it published. It was definitely intimidating. My biggest takeaway was that despite the current political atmosphere around research, there were still so many researchers who are passionate about sharing their work and collaborating with each other across the oceans. Being with everyone and sharing our findings and methodologies was very inspiring. It was a great opportunity to meet a lot of established senior researchers. Just sitting next to them in the conference was surreal.
What was it like to receive the award?
MZ: Professor Chang and I saw that on the conference schedule, we were in the panel for top papers. It was an unexpected moment because there were faculty, post-graduate and Ph.D. students. On a personal level, it’s meaningful for me to receive this award because it validated the place that research into gender inequality and diversity has in academia despite political pushback.
How do you think that this research contributes to the larger conversation about gender inequalities?
MZ: Online spaces mirror interactions in real life. All of these digital spaces are third spaces for us to engage with, and they amplify the inequalities that we see in the real world. Thinking about how Dartmouth collaboration appears, I see how professors and students collaborate with each other — the way that students choose who their friends are. Even in Greek life, who is able to be included? What do people think of individuals of different backgrounds contributing to spaces of collaboration? What benefit do either of them gain, and is that related to their background and gender? What might we be missing?
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
