“Understanding Gender Specific Homophily on Instagram: A Narrative Review to evaluate Digital Gender Gap.”

Abstract

Instagram is amongst the most popularly used social media apps to promote change and to create content for visibility and engagement. One of the widely known phenomena resulting from online social interactions is, gender based homophily, which is the tendency of users to create communities with people of the same gender. The current review of literature pinpoints on the built- in structure of  social networking apps which include algorithmic filtering and personalized curation of information resulting in stronger communities which are homogenous in nature. The present study is a narrative review to evaluate the factors of gender specific homophily on instagram and how it has created a digital gender gap despite successful interventions by policymakers. The findings indicate that user’s personalized content curation reinforce their existing beliefs and perceptions and create barriers for access to contradictory information. This creates gender based communities on social media causing a digital homogeneity.  Future studies must focus on evaluating the relation between different psychological factors such as emotional processing and behavioural patterns to understand the factors which motivate users towards homophilic interactions on instagram.