Gender dynamics in online deliberation: evidence from the 2023 Meta Community Forum on AI chatbots

Deliberative mini-publics are currently being employed throughout the world, and it has been well documented that women are less likely to exercise their voice in deliberation. Yet the advent of digital platforms that host discussions online could mitigate this gender gap, and make it easier to test theories about the design of deliberative institutions. Increasing descriptive representation – the number of women in a discussion group – could potentially improve women's frequency of participation and quality of experience; however, we know less about how these dynamics play out in deliberative settings that take place entirely online.

In this discussion, Dr Alexandra Cirone will share insights from her research on the 2023 Meta Community Forum on AI Chatbots, which brought together 1,541 people in a Deliberative Polling exercise that took place on a digital platform. Drawing on this unique dataset, her research explores how gender composition within randomly assigned discussion groups influences participation and perceptions of deliberation – revealing a persistent gender gap in engagement, but surprisingly little impact of group makeup on overall satisfaction or perceived efficacy, with important implications for the design of inclusive digital forums.

Meet our speaker

Dr Alexandra Cirone is a faculty in the School of Public Policy, and has a joint appointment in the Government Department at LSE. She is also a Faculty Affiliate at the DSI. Her research focuses on lottery-based selection in democracies, sampling and recruitment in deliberative democracy, digital governance, and historical political economy. She is also a non-resident fellow in Democratic Innovations at Yale University ISPS, and serves on the Governance Innovation Council at Meta. She received her PhD from Columbia University, and previously was faculty at Cornell University.

This seminar is part of the DSI Faculty Affiliate Research Showcase series that highlights research from across LSE in the field of Data Science and AI.

LSE holds a wide range of events, covering many of the most controversial issues of the day, and speakers at our events may express views that cause offence. The views expressed by speakers at LSE events do not reflect the position or views of the London School of Economics and Political Science.