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For a show with the IMDb average gender breakdown of 30 percent women and 70 percent men, men rated the show 0.5 points lower than women did, on average. When a show’s raters split evenly by gender, 50-50, men rated the program a full 1 point lower than women did.

We can also drill down and look at the percentage of IMDb users who assigned a 1 rating to programs, the lowest score. Among shows with at least 10,000 ratings (566 programs of our overall set of 2,514), men and women gave out 1s at about the same rate: 2.8 percent of male votes were a 1, while 2.1 percent of female votes were a 1. So one gender is not particularly more negative than the other.

But that’s for all shows with more than 10,000 votes. When you look at shows that have at least 10,000 ratings and raters who skewed male or female, a different picture emerges. Of the top 100 shows that skewed male, 3.3 percent of female votes were 1 out of 10. But of the top 100 shows that skewed female, 6.7 percent of male votes were 1 out of 10. That’s a pretty huge difference.

The overall effect of this imbalance is profound. Among shows with 10,000 ratings or more, the average rating of the top-100 male-skewing shows was 8.2, while the average rating of the top-100 female shows was 7.4.

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