Gender Typicality of Behavior Predicts Success on Creative Platforms

Collaboration platforms on the Internet have become crucial tools for independent creative workers, facilitating connections with collaborators, users, and buyers. Such platforms carried the promise of better opportunities for women and other underrepresented groups to access markets and collaborators, but the evidence is mounting that they rather perpetuate existing biases and inequalities. In previous work, we had found that the majority of women's disadvantage in success and survival on GitHub stems from what they do the gender typicality of their behavior in open source programming rather than from categorical discrimination of their gender. In this article, we replicate our findings on another platform with a markedly different focus Behance, a community for graphic artists. We also study attention as a new outcome on both platforms. We found that female typicality of behavior is a significant negative predictor of attention, success, and survival on creative platforms, while the impact of categorical gender varies by outcome and field. We found support for the visibility paradox of women in technical fields while female typicality of behaviors is negatively related to attention, being female predicts a higher level of attention. We quantified the indirect impact of gender homophily on success via gendered behavior that accounts for 37 percent of the disadvantage of women in success. Our findings suggest that the negative impact of the gender typicality of behavior is a more general phenomenon than our first study indicated, underlining the scope of the challenge of countering unconscious gender bias in the platform economy.