Mattson, TomWeng, QinRen, Jie2024-12-262024-12-262025-01-07978-0-9981331-8-844463cfd-0186-463f-8227-e69f41ba4badhttps://hdl.handle.net/10125/109632We investigate the level of empathy mental health posts receive on social media and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Specifically, we examine gender effects to determine if posts authored by self-identified men, women, or unknown (no self-identified gender discloser) receive varying levels of empathy across different technical platforms. Using a sample of mental health posts from Reddit, we find that self-identified women receive more empathy relative to men across all platforms. We further find that Inflection Pi, a GenAI tool specifically designed to be empathetic, provides the most empathy, but it still favors self-identified women over men. Self-identified men attempting to receive empathy for their prolonged emotional distress are disadvantaged relative to self-identified women.10Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 InternationalBright and Dark Side of Social Media in the Marginalized Contextsempathy, gender effects, generative artificial intelligence, mental health, social mediaConference Paper10.24251/HICSS.2025.784