Whose Voices Are Heard? Gender Disparities in Platform-Facilitated Discrimination and Content Moderation

Historically, cisgender men have maintained systemic social, cultural, and political privilege over other genders, and online discrimination serves as a mechanism for reinforcing this dominance. Content moderation plays a crucial role in shaping online experiences, yet the ways it may perpetuate or mitigate discrimination remain underexplored. This study examines how content moderation and discussions on discrimination-related discussions vary across gendered online communities by analyzing 124 subreddits spanning three gender groups: women, men, and gender minorities (GM). Through manual annotation of 1,535 posts and machine learning classification of 6,613 additional posts, we assess the prevalence of user discussion regarding online discrimination and content moderation. Our findings indicate that 16.67\% of all labeled posts referenced discrimination, with a significant disparity across groups: 26.56\% of women’s posts, 15.58\% of GM users' posts, and 7.75\% of men’s posts. Additionally, women were most likely to report top-down moderation issues, such as bans and content removal, while GM users engaged more frequently with general content moderation concerns. Time series analysis indicates that content moderation complaints have increased over time, with the steepest rise among women users. These gendered differences highlight how moderation policies and enforcement impact gender groups differently. Our findings underscore the need for software engineering and user experience improvements in content moderation tools to enhance transparency, equity, and user-driven moderation experiences to protect against discrimination.