Cover Image: Illustration by author. Original photo by Molly Belle on Unsplash

I have to search hard to find them

This week, I did a simple experiment to see what Medium’s recommendation engine would suggest to me on the new home page. The results were quite fascinating, to say the least.

The process was simple, I refreshed the home page 10 times in a row, taking a screenshot of what I saw. From there, I compiled how many articles were from men and how many were from women. Here are the screenshots and compiled results (you can click on it to view all images):

10/50 articles (20 percent) were from female writers

I kept the part on the right-hand side of the screenshots above so that you know I’m not cheating and that the screenshots were indeed taken back-to-back. They show the same writers with the same number attached to them.

Earlier this month, Medium removed writers’ names next to the articles. Writers panicked. It was a small change that had huge implications. I’m assuming Medium did that because they were trying to bridge the inequality gap. Who knows if it worked. They added it back, likely because of the backlash.

But, what if people are indeed sexist and knowingly avoid reading articles from women? In that sense, I liked the change. Now with the names added back, it’s much easier to discriminate if someone chooses to (please don’t).

Medium announced their move to be more “relational”, which essentially means it will start showing you more articles from writers you follow. It is about connecting writers to readers and vice versa.

But, it turns out, if you accidentally follow more men than women, like me for example, you’ll see fewer stories from female writers. You’ll follow more male writers because that’s what you’ll see on your home page. The cycle only reinforces a bias you may not even have in the first place.

That being said, I see that they did an effort to still add writers you’re not following. I follow about 25 percent of the people from the list above. I’m assuming the rest are people who write about my interests and have things in common with the other writers I follow. I applaud this idea.

So, does Medium have a gender bias?

I don’t think so. The results from above could be due to so many factors no one comprehends currently. Here are some some that could influence me seeing only a few stories from women:

The topics I follow (Education, Creativity, Productivity, Self)
The limited number of people I follow (198 writers)
The articles I clapped for in the past
Fewer female writers in publications I follow (The Ascent, Better Marketing)
Bad luck (10 refreshes isn’t that big a sample)

Other possibilities not related to my account:

There are fewer female writers on the platform (I have no way of knowing this)
Male writers publish more frequently (I can almost confirm this is not true)

I liked seeing diversity in the results from above. Quite a few writers are not white dudes. Now, I wish I was seeing more diversity when it comes to gender.

Seeing more from people I follow is nice, but how would I discover new writers? I’m guessing most people discover writers from the home page, and more specifically anything showed above “the fold”.

I wonder if there would be a way to have a simple toggle button that would turn on/off people you follow, kind of like an “incognito” mode on Chrome. I know my friend Niklas Göke gets more “interesting” results simply for the fact that he follows no one.

That toggle idea might not be a nice user experience design, but maybe there’s a way to make that nice?

I want good ideas to find me, but currently, it’s recycling content from writers I know. Good ideas, to me, are ideas that challenge my point of view on things. They’re ideas that come from people who have a different background than I do. Currently, I have a hard time finding them. I want to discover their ideas and read about them.

I hope to discover more diverse ideas in the future.

Thanks for the great work, Medium’s team.

— Danny