New FREED study · Research Thinking
The gender gap on YouTube: who creates the content in 2026
We analyzed 300 YouTube channels in Mexico and the global evidence on content creators. The finding: there's no gender gap in the audience, but there is a huge gap in who creates, earns, and gets cited by AI.
Watch the full analysis on our YouTube channel
- channels analyzed in Mexico: top 100 overall, science & technology, and travel
- 300
- YouTube users in Mexico, the Spanish-speaking country with the largest audience
- 85 M
- active users worldwide
- 2.7 B
- the creator economy will move by 2030, up from US$ 150 B in 2023
- US$ 528 B
The central finding
No gap in consumption; a massive gap in creation
YouTube's audience is nearly balanced between men and women. The gap appears when you look at who's behind the biggest channels — and that underrepresentation is mirrored in the citations made by artificial intelligence.
Who watches YouTube
YouTube audience in the US, October 2025
- Women51%
- Men49%
Who creates on YouTube
Top 100 channels in Mexico, general category
- Women19%
- Men75%
- Collaborative6%
The FREED study
300 YouTube channels in Mexico, under the microscope
Mexico is the Spanish-speaking country with the largest YouTube audience and ranks in the global top 5, with 85 million users. We analyzed the gender of those leading the top 100 in three categories, based on Social Blade's rankings.
Top 100 overall
- Women19%
- Men75%
- Collaborative6%
Science & technology
- Women5%
- Men93%
- Collaborative2%
Travel
- Women7%
- Men77%
- Collaborative16%
In science and technology — the category that carries the most weight in the conversation about innovation and AI — only 5 out of every 100 top channels are created by women.
The academic evidence
The gender gap also dominates educational content
Pattier's 2021 study, published in the Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research, analyzed the 204 most successful educational channels in Spain and confirmed the gap among EduTubers.
76%
of EduTubers are men: 3 out of every 4, even though women make up 67% of the professional teaching workforce in Spain.
55%
of new EduTubers in 2019 were women: the trend is positive, but the accumulated gap is still enormous.
The gap by field of knowledge
Percentage of men among EduTubers in each field (Spain, 2021)
- Technology90%of EduTubers are men
- Humanities61%of EduTubers are men
Pattier groups the drivers of the inequality into four categories: media exposure, women's participation in the educational stages most in demand on YouTube, video success factors, and time devoted to the channel.
The gap is also in pay
Male creators earn 40% more
According to Collabstr's 2025 Influencer Marketing Report, male creators charge on average 40% more than female creators per brand collaboration.
"Women are often called 'influencers,' while men identify as 'content creators.' This distinction carries significant implications."
- Male creatorsUS$ 291
- Female creatorsUS$ 208
Average per brand collaboration. Source: Collabstr, 2025.
Why it matters
YouTube shapes what AI cites and how the world learns
94%
of AI citations point to long-form YouTube videos, not shorts. YouTube is the second most-cited social platform by AI and, together with Reddit, accounts for 78.2% of social citations.
70%
of people prefer video to learn how to build something; 69% to acquire a new skill (ThinkWithGoogle). YouTube is the second most visited website in Europe after Google.
200×
more AI citations does YouTube receive than any other video platform: it holds an absolute monopoly on the format in generative answers.
The creator economy: a US$ 528 billion market by 2030
The creator market will more than triple in size between 2023 and 2030. Between 2021 and 2023 alone, YouTube paid out more than US$ 70 billion to creators, artists, and media companies. If women don't create, they're left out of this growth.
- 1502023
- 2252025
- 3252027
- 5282030
Market size in billions of dollars. Source: Thrivecart, 2025.
Takeaways
Three ideas to take away
No gap in consumption
There's no significant gender gap in content consumption on YouTube: the audience is balanced.
A big gap in creation
Women are heavily underrepresented as content creators on YouTube and, by extension, in AI citations.
A real opportunity
There's an active female audience and a growing market. The time to create is now.
Prefer to watch it?
Watch the full analysis on YouTube
Carmen Gerea, founder of FREED, walks through the study's data, the evidence on the gender gap, and what this means for brands, creators, and content teams.
How we did it
Methodology and sources
We analyzed the gender of those leading the 300 top channels in Mexico (October 2025) and cross-checked it with academic evidence and leading industry reports.
Note: the original study was conducted in Spanish, based on 300 YouTube channels from Mexico, and the downloadable PDF is in Spanish.
- FREED's own analysis: 300 YouTube channels in Mexico (Social Blade rankings, October 2025)
- Pattier, D. (2021). The Gender Gap Among EduTubers. Journal of New Approaches in Educational Research
- Statista / DataReportal: gender distribution of YouTube users in the US (October 2025)
- Collabstr: 2025 Influencer Marketing Report (creator pay gap)
- ThinkWithGoogle: preference for video-based learning
- SparkToro / Datos: most visited sites in the EU/UK (2025)
- Otterly.ai and BrightEdge: YouTube citations in AI answers
- Thrivecart: creator economy projections through 2030