Can museums find male or female audiences online with YouTube?
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-06-2018-0146 |
| Published date | 17 September 2018 |
| Pages | 481-497 |
| Date | 17 September 2018 |
| Author | Mike Thelwall |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management |
Can museums find male or female
audiences online with YouTube?
Mike Thelwall
University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to investigates if and why audience gender ratios vary between
museum YouTube channels, including for museums of the same type.
Design/methodology/approach –Gender ratios were examined for public comments on YouTube videos
from 50 popular museums in English-speaking nations. Terms that were more frequently used by males or
females in comments were also examined for gender differences.
Findings –The ratio of female to male YouTube commenters varies almost a hundredfold between
museums. Some of the difference could be explained by gendered interests in museum themes (e.g. military,
art) but others were due to the topics chosen for online content and could address a gender minority audience.
Practical implications –Museums can attract new audiences online with YouTube videos that target
outside their expected demographics.
Originality/value –This is the first analysis of YouTube audience gender for museums.
Keywords Art galleries, Gender, Audiences, Museums, YouTube, Social web
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Public museums and art galleries conserve collections of artefacts, often related to a theme,
such as art, culture, history and science. They employ a variety of strategies to attract
visitors (e.g. O’Reilly and Lawrenson, 2014). A web presence may be used to advertise,
provide richer detail for visitors, or give alternative access to those unable to attend in
person (e.g. Coleman and Nankervis, 2015). Three quarters of 982 UK arts and cultural
organisations believed that digital technologies helped them to fulfil their missions in 2015,
with most (56 per cent) using YouTube as part of this (Nesta, 2015). Moreover, 29 per cent of
museums and art galleries posted their own content to YouTube in 2016 (Visit Britain, 2016).
Nothing is known about whether online content can help to attract new audiences, however,
such as those from demographics that rarely visit.
Whilst many museums aim to serve the whole public (Quinlan-Gagnon, 2012), others
target social issues such as gender and class inequalities (Spring et al., 2018). A museum
may therefore wish to attract a demographic because it would not normally visit or because
it is the target of an exhibition (e.g. Merriman, 2018). This paper focuses on gender and
assesses whether YouTube museum videos can attract gendered audiences.
YouTube contains limited implicit public gender information for the traditional binary
genders (male/female), althoughnot for non-binary genders. Sincethis information is public it
can be used to compare female/male audience ratios between museum videos. Public social
media has been previously used to investigate museum-related online activities (Facebook
questionnaires: S undjaja et al., 2017),but not for YouTube on a large scale.The current paper
investigates videos posted by 50 large museums for insights into their audience genders.
It exploits the publicly available information in their comments for evidence that the
proportionsof females and males watching videos variesbetween museums. A positive result
would suggest that museums could reasonably target audience genders on YouTube.
Museums and gender
For many people, attending a museum is a choice unless they visitas part of an organised
trip or at the behest of friends or family members. When made, this choice is influenced
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 70 No. 5, 2018
pp. 481-497
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-06-2018-0146
Received 20 June 2018
Revised 15 August 2018
Accepted 27 August 2018
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
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Museums and
audience
gender on
YouTube
by a person’s interests, which is in turn influenced by their socialised gender identity.
To compare museum videos online by audience gender it is therefore useful to understand
why there are gender differences in the visitors to different types of museums. This review
focuses on binary genders with apologies to non-binary genders, for which more research
is needed.
Gender and interests
There are substantial (binary) gender differences in interests that may be primarily due to
social pressures (e.g. Halpern and Perry-Jenkins, 2016; McHale et al., 2009; Kornienko et al.,
2016) and media gender stereotypes (e.g. Matthes et al., 2016). In psychology, gender
differences in interests have been studied most in terms of toy choices by children.
For example, one study showed that babies exhibited sharply gendered reactions to toys
even prior to their development of gender identities (Alexander et al., 2009). Together with
human-like gendered toy choices in some primates (Hassett et al., 2008) and pre-natal
testosterone levels moderating gendered preferences (Hines, 2011; Swan et al., 2010), this
gives evidence of a biological sex component to gendered interests. In particular, boys’
interest in toys associated with spatial movement, such as wheeled trucks, appears to be a
generic, but variable, human masculine trait (Hines, 2011). These initial tendencies then
seem to be exacerbated by social processes, creating substantial gender divides in
adulthood. Nevertheless, greater male interest in museums for things that move (e.g. cars,
aircraft, spacecraft) may have a partially biological explanation.
More generally, social psychologists argue that for adults there seems to be a greater
male interest in “things”and a greater female interest in people (Su et al., 2009).
Thus, museums and art galleries that naturally or deliberately relate to people or human
dimensions may tend to attract more female visitors. Similarly, greater levels of male
aggression (Bettencourt and Miller, 1996) and greater involvement in military careers may
partly explain a greater male interest in military museums. Specialist museums for topics
closely tied to other gendered careers (e.g. nursing) can also be expected to attract a
corresponding gendered audience.
Museum attendance and gender
There is little public information or academic research about museum attendance by gender
and no systematic comparisons of museum audiences by type. This is a strange omission,
given that there is extensive research into other gender issues within museums, including
staffing (Callihan and Feldman, 2018), as well as representations of gender and sexuality,
gendered reactions to exhibits, and cases where non-male artists or traditions are ignored
(Levin, 2010). Prior research has typically been qualitative, focusing on a single case, and
theory-driven, interpreting that case in the light of a general sociological theory.
The little public information that exists about museum visitor genders suggests that a
female majority is the norm. A survey of European museums found that most visitors were
female (58 per cent), including for most individual museums. The gender breakdown varied
from the National Museum of Estonia (63 per cent female) to the National Historical Museum
of Athens (45 per cent female) (Bounia et al., 2012). All six northern Ireland museums in
another survey had mostly female visitors, with the highest being 70 per cent at the
F.E McWilliam Gallery & Studio (ANI, 2016). In New Zealand, women were the majority
(58 per cent) of visitors to 37 museums and art galleries (Museums Aotearoa, 2017). Other
museums with mostly female visitors include Cambridge University (59 per cent female)
(TAA, 2014), Washington State History Museum in 2013 (64 per cent female) (Morey Group,
2013), West Highland Museum (local and regional history, Scotland) Visitors Survey 2016
respondents (56 per cent female) (OSSL, 2016), but not the Hong Kong Museum of History
Permanent Exhibition (49 per cent female) (Actrium Solutions, 2016). There is less data on
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