Being a "social media influencer" has nothing to do with the size of your audience or the nature of your work. An influencer used to be someone with a giant, million-plus following to sell things to, but marketers have since expanded the term, piling on prefixes like macro-, micro-, and even nano-influencers, who can have audiences of just 1,000. Influencers aren't confined to a genre anymore, either. There are still the standard-issue Instagram beauty and lifestyle influencers, but also restaurant influencers, real estate influencers, pet influencers. Really, the only way to guarantee that people will think of your online celebrity as "influence" is to be a woman.

Many men of the internet will fracture their own vertebrae to avoid being called influencers, even when their work—building a brand, getting #sponsored, promoting products and themselves—fits the definition. They prefer terms like "digital content creator" or "content producer" or industry-specific terms like "gamer," usually because they think of themselves as artists or members of the entertainment industry, and sometimes, as several content creators and their agents have told me, because they just really hate the word influencer. Plenty of women do too, but the way people talk about these creators points to the prevailing assumptions: James Charles is a "male beauty influencer," while any woman who streams herself playing videogames on Twitch is a "female gamer." Those phrases may not catch everyone's eye, but words matter, especially on the internet, and how someone is identified can have a huge impact.

Self-branding makes divergence in terms inevitable. Anyone can give themselves any title they like, and there are reasons to resist "influencer": It's a money-minded bit of corporatese that, for some reason, thousands have embraced as an identity. (Granted, referring to your artistic creations as "content" also makes you sound like a marketing robot.) But in this age of keywords and hashtags, what you call yourself has an enormous impact on who sees and consumes your work. For fans, online celebrities, and researchers studying them, tiny differences in diction can make internet culture seem far more gender segregated than it really is.

The solution will not come from forcing all internet creators to adopt any one single term. When you try, people get hostile. While at a streaming and gaming conference, Crystal Abidin, a digital anthropologist studying internet celebrity, and a few other women presenters referred to people who think of themselves as "gamers" as "influencers" or "internet celebrities. "We got a lot of pushback," Abidin says. "They thought we were conflating them with lifestyle content producers." Nobody likes feeling lumped in with everyone else, but, according to Abidin, the reaction was political. It's not that these gamers thought the term influencer was confusing or imprecise. They thought it was offensive. "They don't want to be cast as frivolous," she says. "The idea is that influencing is easier than producing something." Even when what you're producing is a two-hour video of yourself playing a videogame.

Yes, of course, influencers produce things. Yes, the subtext is that influencing is somehow beneath producing, and, yep, that smells sexist. But it might point to the actual difference between men and women's contributions to the internet—not their value or their subject matter, but how the creator thinks about themselves. Take online fashion personalities. "Female influencers showcase their physical selves," says Brooke Erin Duffy, who studies social media and influencers at Cornell University. "But men show the flat lays." (Flat lays are an Instagram staple: a collection of objects artfully arranged on a flat surface, viewed from directly above.)

'Using multiple terms isn't inherently good or bad, but those who control the terms of conversation can use it to leverage power.' David Nieborg, University of Toronto

The content is the same: Here are some clothes I like. Generally speaking, women consider themselves part of the product, while men separate their notion of self from their labor, considering themselves its "creator." Maybe that's another data point for the "men are interested in things, and women are interested in people" argument; maybe men feel less photogenic; maybe being taller makes bird's-eye-view photography easier. "Using multiple terms isn't inherently good or bad," says David Nieborg, who studies the politics and economics of online platforms at the University of Toronto. "But those who control the terms of conversation can use it to leverage power." On their own, those gender trends might not mean much unless you attach judgement to them, as the gamers Abidin encountered did, and give some terms privilege over others.