While trying to grow our YouTube channel I have become aware of some gender bias issues with YouTube's algorithm, which we suspect are making it challenging to find success for our storytelling series.
 
If you'd like to help combat this problem, please click to watch an episode on our channel. While we work hard to make entertaining content worth watching, you could actually just click and play a video in another browser tab in the background with the sound off if you're too busy to pay close attention right now. Even the activity of playing the video is helpful. If you want the more specific details and how I arrived at this conclusion, read on, because it's story time!

Most Boredwalk fans know we put a lot of time into making amusing video content. While we've been able to get in front of tons of new people this way on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram, YouTube has been unusually difficult.
 
When I first started posting content to YouTube, I posted the short form humor videos you've probably seen on our TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram accounts. While those videos did great on the other platforms, they kept flopping on YouTube. Not only did they flop, but they were getting tons of hate comments from men.
 
While we are no strangers to hateful comments from poorly behaved people on social media — internet gonna internet, after all — overwhelmingly we get comments from a lot of women who enjoy our content, along with some men who also get it and appreciate our point of view and sensibilities. In case you didn't know it, Boredwalk's customer base is 80% female! This makes sense. I am a woman, our work has a woman's point of view, and I am our head creative.

Noting that YouTube was going in the wrong direction, I decided to change our content format and develop the storytelling‌ videos you've seen us mention and link to here in our newsletter in recent months.
 
This is a format that has an audience on YouTube, aligns really well with our Delve Deck conversation starter card sets & beach balls, and when I checked on the comment section on videos in this style I saw lots of female commenters. This seemed like a good direction for us to move in, so I got to work, but still no luck. The hate comments were less of a factor, but getting picked up by the YouTube algorithm just wasn't happening. I thought maybe it was a skill issue.
 
I signed up for a class with a widely respected YouTube strategist. I thought maybe I just needed to learn more. And while creative professionals like me can always continue to get better at our craft, I started noticing a pattern.
 
The first thing I observed is that my classmates were 95% male. The next thing I noticed was the example content the class used for training material. Nearly every example video the instructor showed us was about sports or video games or cars. I understand women can be interested in these things, but it's not what's most likely the case.
 
One of the few women in my class is a lesbian making videos about her dating life. She complained that her videos get flooded with hundreds of hate comments every time she posts and she cannot seem to get in front of her target audience. So this woman can't get her channel in front of her target audience, I am struggling with it too. The class is full of men, the training material is all examples of content for men. Do you see a pattern here?

On the first day of class the instructor told us the YouTube algorithm is so great at helping you find content you're interested in, that he wanted to demonstrate. He showed us some car video and then showed us how you could go to YouTube in an incognito window of your browser — a view of YouTube that knows nothing about you — and get to this car video in just a few clicks. He opened an incognito window and showed us how he could click a challenge video, then a truck video, then a few more vehicle videos and ultimately YouTube would lead him to this specific car video he had in mind without searching. He summed up the demonstration by exclaiming "Isn't that amazing?!"

I was... less impressed. I sat there thinking "what if you are interested in makeup tutorials, or craft projects, or interior design, or some other thing men aren't stereotypically interested in?"
 
I decided I needed to know. I opened an incognito window and went to the YouTube home page (if you wanna try this experiment yourself, open an incognito browser and tap the "Shorts" icon, and then tap "Home" to get it to show you a bunch of videos it would suggest if it knew nothing about you).

 
Here's what I noticed:

1. The vast majority of the faces on the home page was male.
2. None of the videos suggested were likely to be interesting to the average woman. (Please spare me the reflexive & snarky "what is an average woman?" response — you know what I mean; don't be obtuse.)

I noticed there was a "suggested topics" bar on this home page. The suggestions were gaming, podcasts, news, power tools, action thrillers, trucks, tourism, sports tournaments, cars, and sports video games. Every time I've tried this experiment the lineup changes slightly, but the pattern does not: the suggested topics are always things that are most likely to be interesting to men.
 
Tourism, news and podcasts could be interesting to anyone, but the rest of that list is very gendered. Does YouTube genuinely believe the average internet user (who is just as likely to be female as male) is more interested in power tools than something like pet videos or late night interviews or some other more popular topic?
 
Could I get to content that's likely to be interesting to women? Yes. Does it exist on the platform? Of course. Are there successful female creators making content for women on YouTube? Yes. It's not a matter of does it exist, it's a matter of whether that content is given an equal discovery opportunity as a default setting.

 
I searched "comedy" in the search bar, which should be an interest that could be for men or women, yet I still had to scroll down 5 long form videos to see a thumbnail that wasn’t a man’s face. I finally got one with a bunch of faces of both genders. I scrolled through 50 videos and was not suggested a single female comedy creator’s account. I did get a Matt Rife video suggested right at the top, a man who is best known for writing domestic violence jokes. YouTube was not only showing preference for male content creators, it was showing preference for male creators who are actively hostile to women. It could have suggested content from many male creators with way more followers and/or views, but it chose Rife.
 
I searched “stand up comedy.” The first video was of Chris D’elia. D’elia is best known for soliciting nude photos of underage girls. Under D’elia’s video — and a video by another man — I finally saw a female standup comic. I then saw another 26 male comics suggested to me before I saw a woman’s face again.
 
Next I tried "movie reviews." I got all male creators talking about action movies. I did not say “action movie reviews.” I got 20 men on the results page and 1 woman at the end, and that woman was talking about an action movie. I could have searched "rom com reviews" to give it more direction, but I wanted to see if there was a bias for a topic that is pretty gender neutral and there it was.

Earlier this week Taylor Swift dropped a new music video. I found out about it from her Instagram story and clicked and watched. I thought to myself "Swift is a massive star, I bet this video is racking up views like crazy on YouTube. I wonder what happens on that incognito home page when she posts a new video. She is definitely what is trending on YouTube today." I tried it.
 
Swift collected millions of views on her music video in a few hours; her channel has 59.7M subscribers. I opened YouTube in an incognito window while this was happening and I got the same content suggestions: a ton of dude stuff. I saw Joe Rogan being promoted front and center; he'd posted an episode of his podcast around the time Swift posted her video.
 
Swift has more than three times as many subscribers as Rogan does, and her newest video got over three times as many views as the video Rogan posted around the same time. If the YouTube algorithm is really interested in showing a new user what's hot on the platform because it doesn't know them, why would it suggest Rogan and not Swift?
 
It is important to note here that YouTube pays creators for views. Obviously neither Swift nor Rogan cares about that revenue because they mostly earn money in other ways and have tons of money already, but what it does signal is a bias in the algorithm that even Taylor Swift isn't immune to — which is itself an extension of software engineers who programmed it. If the bias in the algorithm is affecting how likely it is to recommend a video posted by Swift think of how it could impact less famous female creators?
 
It's unlikely Swift got those millions of views simply because the YouTube algorithm treated her video fairly. I suspect it did not. She likely got to those numbers because she linked her video on other platforms and her fans came to YouTube to watch it. I now understand I probably have to do the same to support YouTube videos.

I obviously do not have Taylor Swift's influence, but if everyone reading this watched a video on our channel it would impact metrics and give it a visibility boost that we wouldn't otherwise get.‌ It would also unlock the ability for me to link our online shop to our channel, a feature I cannot access because I cannot just get views by making good videos the way I do on Instagram, TikTok, etc. I have to bring my own audience in to start pushing YouTube to give me more views.
 
Once I realized this was an issue I wondered if anyone else was talking about it. I found this Reddit conversation about it and this academic study about how YouTube is indoctrinating young men. This is bad, and evidence I'm not the only one noticing this. It's a problem that needs more attention.
 
This is an inequality issue and it should not be happening. It impacts the ability of women to be served as users on YouTube. It impacts the ability of female creators like me to earn money.
 
We don't see this issue playing out on other platforms like TikTok or Instagram, and as far as I could tell from my findings, Instagram has 4x the active users that YouTube has. That is unsurprising when YouTube is going out of its way to send the message that they prefer creators/viewers who are male and fit into their narrow conception of masculinity.
 
People can pressure YouTube to change, but we can all take smaller actions every day to support female creators, simply by watching and sharing content. Every time you watch or share the videos of a creator you like, it helps that creator's account. I hope sharing what I've observed will help this issue gain more awareness and maybe affect some change.

Alright, HUGE thanks for reading this really long screed, and for anything you can do to help us fight the good fight!