Gender Gap in the Creator Economy: Evidence from U.S. Top YouTubers

This paper provides one of the first systematic estimates of the gender income gap in the creator economy.
Using a sample of top YouTubers in the United States, we document a persistent income gap of approximately 22.8\%, with female creators earning significantly less than male creators even after conditioning on rich demographic, channel, content, production, and engagement controls.
Sequential covariate inclusion, Gelbach decomposition, and Blinder--Oaxaca decomposition show that demographics and other human‐capital variables do not explain the gap; instead, content niche, annual content production, and especially audience engagement account for most of the explained component, though a large share remains unexplained.
Robustness checks using alternative income measures, HC3 inference, unconditional quantile regression, and propensity score matching confirm that the gap persists across specifications and is more pronounced among lower‐earning creators.
Taken together, the evidence suggests that platform‐specific mechanisms—such as differential monetization opportunities, advertiser preferences, and audience or algorithmic biases—likely contribute to structural gender inequality in emerging digital labor markets.

En coautoría con Rui Yang (Departament d’Economia Aplicada, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona) y Martin Brun (Finnish Centre of Excellence in Tax Systems Research (FIT), Tampere University)