Through a Gender Lens: An Empirical Study of Emoji Usage over Large-Scale Android Users
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Emojis have gained incredible popularity in recent years and become a new ubiquitous language for Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) by worldwide users. Various research efforts have been made to understand the behaviors of using emojis. Gender-specific study is always meaningful for HCI community, however, so far we know very little about whether and how much males and females vary in emoji usage. To bridge such a knowledge gap, this paper makes the first effort to explore the emoji usage through a gender lens. Our analysis is based on the largest data set to date, which covers 134,419 users from 183 countries, along with their over 401 million messages collected in three months. We conduct a multi-dimensional statistical analysis from various aspects of emoji usage, including the frequency, preferences, input patterns, public/private CMC-scenario patterns, temporal patterns, and sentiment patterns. The results demonstrate that emoji usage can significantly vary between males and females. Accordingly, we propose some implications that can raise useful insights to HCI community.
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