A study of gender in user reviews on the Google Play Store

User reviews that are posted on the Google Play Store provide app developers with important information such as bug reports, feature requests, and user experience. Developers should maintain their apps while taking user feedback into account to succeed in the competitive market of mobile apps. the Google Play Store provides a star-rating mechanism for users to rate apps on a scale of one to five. Apps that are ranked higher and have higher star ratings are more likely to be downloaded. In this paper, we investigate and compare men’s and women’s participation in user reviews that are posted on the Google Play Store. We analyze 438,707 user reviews of the top 156 Android apps over six months. We find that women give higher star ratings and use more positive sentiment in their reviews than men. Furthermore, women’s reviews receive more likes and are ranked higher in the top 10 by the Google Play Store. For the reviews from which user gender can be inferred, we find that men submit more reviews than women, making reviews by men more likely to be visible to app developers and other users. Past research has shown that app developers respond more to negative reviews with fewer stars. We found that developers respond to a greater percentage of men’s reviews than women’s. The small number of and more positive reviews by women are less likely to be addressed by app developers; thus, the resulting changes to apps will align more with the needs of men users, perhaps causing even less participation by women in the Google Play Store reviews. Our findings suggest that developers should take gender into consideration when responding to reviews to help mitigate a feedback loop of bias. Our observations also suggest a need for future research in this area to understand the motivations of men and women in reviewing apps and how developers respond to reviews.