Exploring Ethnicity and Gender Bias in TED Talks: A Study of Audience Online Reactions

Audience reactions to oral communication are shaped by both communicative practices and broader social contexts. While elements such as message content, delivery style, and vocal expression can be developed through training, other factors—such as gender and ethnicity—reflect social identities that are often associated with how speakers are perceived and evaluated. This study examines how these contextual attributes are associated with audience engagement in digital public speaking environments. Drawing on an initial dataset of 977 TEDx talks, resulting in two high-confidence subsamples of 610 speakers for gender and 387 for ethnicity, curated through a combination of computational methods with a communication perspective. We analyzed the relationship between the two factors with engagement indicators—including likes, dislikes and interaction rates. The analysis explores whether patterns of audience response differ across demographic groups and at the intersection of gender and ethnicity. The findings reveal that neither gender nor ethnicity, considered on its own, was significantly associated with audience engagement; differences emerged only at the intersection of the two. Specifically, non-Hispanic Black speakers were associated with higher levels of negative feedback in both genders, Hispanic male speakers received more positive engagement than other male speakers, and Asian female speakers showed lower interaction levels—fewer views, likes, and comments—than non-Hispanic White female speakers. These patterns suggest that disparities in how audiences respond to speakers’ social identities in mediated contexts are intersectional, becoming visible only when gender and ethnicity are considered jointly. By providing empirical evidence from a diverse digital corpus, this study contributes to ongoing debates on digital inequalities, representation, and participation in contemporary media environments, highlighting the importance of considering social context in analyses of audience behavior.