Why Women Don’t Use Reddit, and How We Can Fix It (2024)

I’m a really active user of Reddit; it’s a more than daily ritual for me to skim through my favorite subs just before I sleep, ask questions, and comment with advice and jokes. So, it disturbed me when I learned that the gender distribution is so skewed. Seeing as Reddit values authenticity and diversity in perspective, it seems problematic that such an important component of society doesn’t really have the opportunity to contribute their voices and opinions.

Furthermore — Reddit can’t really grow unless it’s able not just to cater to its existing dominant demographic, but to convince those who may never have even heard of Reddit that the platform holds a meaningful, uplifting value proposition.

I really love Reddit. So, I’ve taken some time to write a quick analysis of how Reddit can reach out to women, based Q&A sessions and Reddit walkthroughs with women that I conducted, with the ultimate goal of fixing some of the issues that have led to such a skewed user base.

I contacted female friends, students, and other women both in person and online to get a sense of why women don’t utilize Reddit. While my sample is somewhat biased (college students in the Bay Area are disproportionately represented), it did provide some insight into the most prevalent causes.

I asked a variety of questions, including the following:

• What have you heard about Reddit? Do you know how it works? Do you use Reddit (how often)?
• If you don’t use Reddit, why?
• What do you generally associate with Reddit?
• What kinds of content is most common on Reddit?
• Do you feel welcome on Reddit? Why / why not?

Then, I asked them to conduct a Reddit walkthrough — to go on the Reddit desktop site, explore it, and comment on what they think, while I observed.

I found four common insights:

• Many women are unsure of Reddit’s premise and value proposition. The majority of women I interviewed didn’t know what Reddit is or how it works. Even amongst those that had heard of the platform, there was a lack of awareness of key aspects, like Reddit’s anonymity, the fact that it’s community-based, and the existence of specific well-liked communities. The lack of knowledge about what Reddit is translates into indifference about how Reddit can add value into their lives.
• The website design comes across as unwieldy and STEM-focused, rather than sleek and inclusive. Many commented on how the website design and layout (even post-Reddit redesign) is reminiscent of an early web forum. They mentioned that the icons are chunky, the sidebar and sub-bar look dense and old respectively, and that the “Trending Now” bar that new users are met with on the desktop site seems odd and incomplete. The above factors in combination with some features that are (unfortunately) very core to Reddit, like the presence of many slashes on any given page due to the “r/” subreddit structure, result in a perception of Reddit as a place for programmers, nerds, geeks, and other sub-cultures. While these design, brand, and product decisions are certainly appealing to many people, these categories can be hard to relate to for many women (note that the percentage of women majoring in computer science is <20% as of 2016).
• It’s hard to delve into Reddit on your own. When new users go to the Reddit desktop site for the first time, the content hasn’t yet been tailored to users’ preferences, so a lot of the posts don’t resonate with them. The lack of a tutorial or any guidance throws users head-first into the Reddit platform, resulting in confusion and erroneous assumptions about how Reddit works. In light of these factors, users often perceive the mixture of jokes and serious posts as untrustworthy (especially given the topical problem of fake news). These issues certainly correspond not just to women specifically, but new users in general, but the fact that it’s statistically less likely for women to have friends that use Reddit to walk them through why Reddit is amazing exacerbates their impact.
• Is Reddit safe? Women are disproportionately subject to harassment on the web, and these experiences color their perceptions of anonymous online web forums — according to a Pew Research Center study, 70% of women say that online harassment is a “major” problem (compared to 50% of men), and 60% of women say it’s more important for people to feel safe and welcome online than to be able to speak their minds freely (compared to 40% of men). See the study for more illuminating statistics on how online harassment, and reactions to this harassment, differ between men and women.

Based on the insights above, I’ve compiled some of my thoughts on four different clusters of strategies to combat each of the insights above. For brevity’s sake, these are by no means comprehensive, but they hopefully provide a reasonable overview of the major approaches Reddit should undertake to reach out to women.

• Focused marketing that resonates with women. It’s important to find effective ways to clearly communicate Reddit’s premise and women-specific value proposition. The solution is two-pronged, resting both on increasing marketing to women-frequented spaces and on refining the tone and content of said marketing so that it actually resonates with women. With respect to the latter point, the 2016 mobile app intro video is a good example of some positive measures (e.g. the emphasis on the fun and wholesome qualities of Reddit alongside energetic animations), but there are still many aspects that deserve improvement (e.g. the only vague sense of what Reddit is about that’s communicated, and the presence of an oddly contrasting deep-voiced, almost lethargic narrator).
• Diversified design and branding. The Reddit redesign was amazing in cleaning up some of the old web forum-y vibe that prevented new users from seeing Reddit as a cool, mainstream platform. But more thoughtful attention to detail is needed when it comes to attracting women. Among the possible changes in this arena, a particular improvement could be the inclusion of more interesting, personalizable avatars, as opposed to the currently hom*ogeneously white avatars that appear on multicolored backgrounds. I pasted preliminary sketches of a few ideas below to illustrate diverse, fun, and anonymous avatars that might be cool to include as preset options — or it might be even cooler to allow users to mix and match features to build avatars themselves, Bitmoji-style!

• A better new user experience. It’s hard to delve into Reddit when you haven’t seen it before. Improving this process should not only help women tap into the platform, but reduce the activation barrier for all new users. It’s really important to do so in a thoughtful way, one that doesn’t rely on flawed, over-generalized assumptions about the values and priorities of guests, and to build up this better experience step by step based on an accurate understanding of the many guest archetypes. A few steps that I can think of that could possibly be generalized to all new users include: improving the sub search and recommendation engine; increasing the visibility of related subreddits for a given sub; and making the ability to find subreddits based on user interests universal to all devices, not just the Reddit mobile app.
• An emphasis on safety and inclusivity. I definitely personally see where many safety-related concerns come from; I’ve received my fair share of questionable DMs on Reddit, and I’ve talked to Reddit moderators whose DMs are regularly filled to the brim with disturbing messages (this article sheds more light on the issue). The Reddit team’s certainly doing what they can to tackle the challenging issue of sifting through suboptimal content in such a sprawling community, and mods are doing even more while subject to increased pressure. That being said, it might be useful to limit the number of accounts that can be created per device and per email address so that repeat offenders don’t simply create a new account (while making sure that the number is large enough since normal Reddit users often have multiple anonymous accounts for different purposes). It may also be useful to improve existing NLP models and other algorithms to better detect and ban rogue users. This is not an easy issue to solve by any means, but more consistent statements denouncing misogyny from Reddit admins — backed up by continued and new substantive efforts to change the harmful parts of the Reddit ecosystem — would go a long way towards making women feel more welcome on Reddit.

I’ve conversed with some amazing people behind Reddit informally while thinking through this article, and I’m so glad that they all see the lack of women on the platform as an issue, and that they are striving to find a remedy. I have no doubt that the Reddit team will find new ways to make the community even better, and I’m so hyped to see where Reddit goes from here!

If you have any feedback, questions, or additional insights, I’d really love to hear them. This is an issue that’s personally important to me, and I want to do all that I can to resolve it. Feel free to comment on this post, or shoot me a message on LinkedIn!

• Statista’s distribution of Reddit users by gender: https://www.statista.com/statistics/517155/reddit-user-distribution-usa-gender/
• Reddit’s core values, from the company: https://redditblog.com/2015/05/06/were-sharing-our-companys-core-values-with-the-world/
• An analysis of the creation and effects of online echo chambers: http://shapingthefuture.economist.com/bubble-trouble-internet-echo-chambers-disrupt-society/
• Statements from ex-members of r/TheRedPill, an extremely misogynistic subreddit that has recently been quarantined: https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/internet/2017/02/reddit-the-red-pill-interview-how-misogyny-spreads-online
• Wired’s 2018 article on the demographic breakdown of computer science majors in the United States: https://www.wired.com/story/computer-science-graduates-diversity/
• Reddit’s 2016 mobile app intro video: https://youtu.be/cCnTVd9nMoY
• Reddit moderators on online harassment: https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/31/reddit-moderators-speak-out/