5. Discussion and conclusions
The current study examines the gendered discourse patterns on TheMarker Cafe, a popular online social network, using the social network analysis method. Overall, the findings clearly strengthen former analyses that presented evidence of men's assertive and dominant discourse style and social role versus women's more cooperative and supportive role. In line with our first hypothesis, men wrote more posts, thus initiated and introduced more topics to TheMarker Cafe community, while women more often commented on other peoples' posts. The study also reveals the females' posts received higher ranking than males, possibly due to the fact that females' messages tend to attract more support on online social networks, as identified by several recent analyses (Joiner et al., 2014, 2016).
In addition, our study sought to examine the interplay between the structure of the TheMarker Cafe network and its gendered discourse patterns. Our findings support the hypothesis that activity ties are stronger predictors of content popularity than friendship ties. The fact that women are maintaining more active networks ties (through writing more comments) may explain why women's’ post are more popular than men's ’posts. Our findings suggest that social networks largely conform to traditional norms and the web does not serve as the great equalizer, in the sense that men write more posts and females most often commented more. Nonetheless, women do attract more popularity than men, specifically due to their activity within the social network environment.
