Abstract
Prior research on communication in social networks demonstrates its influence on a variety of democratic behaviors including opinion formation, tolerance, voting behavior, and participation. Largely unexplored in this literature is the potential for unexplored heterogeneity in social influence, particularly across gender lines. In this paper, we move the discussion forward by examining how classic results in the field of social communication, which often did not even control for gender, yield different results when we consider gender dynamics. Women’s networks are constructed differently than men’s, but women also use their networks differently and process information from them differently than men do. The gender dynamics of supply of and demand for political communication combine to change how we think about social influence, fundamentally altering some classic findings about social network effects.