  Social media and digital platforms allow us to express our opinions freely
and easily to a vast number of people. In this study, we examine whether there
are gender-based differences in how communication happens via Twitter in regard
to soccer. Soccer is one of the most popular sports, and therefore, on social
media, it engages a diverse audience regardless of their technical knowledge.
We collected Twitter data for three months (March-June) for English and
Portuguese that contains 9.5 million Tweets related to soccer, and only 18.38%
tweets were identified as belonging to women, highlighting a possible gender
gap already in the number of people who participated actively in this topic. We
then conduct a fine-grained text-level and network-level analysis to identify
the gender differences that might exist while communicating on Twitter. Our
results show that women express their emotions more intensely than men,
regardless of the differences in volume. The network generated from Portuguese
has lower homophily than English. However, this difference in homophily does
not impact how females express their emotions and sentiments, suggesting that
these aspects are inherent norms or characteristics of genders. Our study
unveils more gaps through qualitative and quantitative analyses, highlighting
the importance of examining and reporting gender gaps in online communication
to create a more inclusive space where people can openly share their opinions.
