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[ThisWhole Section is still heavily unfinished]
population
harassment
communication styles
women only lists
women on the web
men online
gender as communication
Some of the results of the main research projects on online gender have been described in the last section because there is always an overlap between research and people's experience and expectations, but it is useful to look at some of these special studies in more detail.
Population
The gathering of statistics of Internet use in general is difficult, and gathering figures for use by gender is even harder. Most of the figures given have to be estimates, and are as likely to overestimate as underestimate. Here we will give a variety of sources and comments. It may be that ways of estimating gender even show something about people's assumptions about gender.
[[Need more recent stats]]
{{from ladendorf}} " Anette Hamilton (1998) writes that according to Jupiter Communications, women number 23 million and represent 40% of the Internet population. Researchers at Intelliquest report an even higher percentage (47%)".
Morahan-Martin (1998) compiles a large number of different sources to show that gender use patterns appear to vary from continent to continent and also by culture. Apparently there are much lower proportions of females online in Europe than in the US, with the least in Japan and the Arabic world. As US users still make up the majority of users, the divisions in the US are perhaps the most significant in terms of total numbers - though the effects of social factors in terms of access are emphasised by these differences between countries.
Kaplan and Farell reported in 1994 that:
"women make up only 20% of the readership of popular computing magazines like PC World_,15% of subscribers to _Wired_, 15-18% of subscribers to the WELL (a surprisingly low figure since many of us _believe_ women are more likely to be engaged in computing when the technology engages the arts in some way), 10% of CompuServe subscribers, 15% of AOL subscribers, 30% of Prodigy subscribers" (#2).
Weisbard writes that:
"Shirley Read, for ex., worried about a "Glass Ceiling in Cyberspace?" in Women's Art (Jan/Feb. 1996 pp. 10-11). She cited a November 1994 survey that determined that 90% of net users were male (Atlas Website: http://www.rhythm.com/bpowell/atlas/toc.html). Elsewhere, CompuServe estimated its female membership at 12% in 1994 (Cited in "Women Linking Up to Explore On-Line," by Ilana DeBare, Sacramento Bee, Jan. 22, 1996, p.A7). In "Gender Issues in Computer Networking," Leslie Regan Shade(... talk at "Community Networking: The Int'l Free-Net Conference, Carleton U., Ottawa, Canada, August 17-19, 1993) pointed out that even in unmoderated feminist newsgroups such as alt.feminism and soc.women, approximately 80% of the messages were posted my men [In the moderated soc.feminism, the rate was more 50/50.]".In a footnote she continues:
"Not very different figures were found when a reporter for The Record spent an afternoon lurking on alt.feminism and soc.women in 1995. He found 65% of the comments on the former were made by men -- or at least had men's names listed as the authors - and 72% on soc.women. ("Women Find Cyberspace is a Man's World: Harassment and Hostility Go On-Line," by Robert Gebeloff, in The Record, February 21, 1995). This kind of relative activity at that time was also found by Gladys We, who discovered, in a count of the newsgroup alt.feminism, that 83% of posts appeared to come from men, in soc.women 78% of posts came from men, and in soc.feminism, even though it was a moderated newsgroups, 40% of post still came from men.
Weisbard continues:
"Already in 1995, Neilsen reported that just over a third of Internet users were female (Nielsen Media Research for Commerce Net, reported in "Another Survey of Internet Users is Out, and This One Has Statistical Credibility," Technology column by Peter H. Lewis, New York Times, October 30, 1995, p. C3). And looking just at usage at universities and other schools, Matrix Information and Directory Services found gender parity was even closer: 59% men to 41% women ("Internet Gender Gap Narrows," dateline San Francisco, May 11, 1995 - forwarded to the list internet-women-info)."By 1997, Computergram International reported that 48% of Americans who exchanged email at least three times a week were women.(Computergram International November 17, 1997 [in Nexis] - no author) Also that year Find/SVP American Internet User Survey showed that the number of women using the Internet had doubled since 1995, to some 9.9 million women.(Cited in Interactive Marketing News, May 30, 1997, no. 22, vol. 4 [in Nexis]; see http://www.findsvp.com for the survey. It was conducted by Research Connections, Inc. (http://www.researchconnections.com). (The publication has changed hands and names a few times since 1997. Latest is Interactive P.R. and Marketing News.] That survey is noteworthy because the communication aspect of the Internet is no longer an interest of the surveyors - the phenomenon moved entirely into the commercial realm where what they want to know about is online shopping behavior".
From Weisbard: "During the holiday shopping season in December 1999, the percentage of Internet users who are women achieved the 50 percent level (By June, 1999, Nielsen estimated that women accounted for 46 percent of the 92 million adults online in North America)."
There are varied reasons given for the population discrepancy - though few reasons for the massive discrepancies in the estimates. Firstly it still requires some technical skill to get connected so there may be a selection in favour of people who already have computer experience - and as we have already suggested this primarily means males. Shade (1993) has pointed out that nearly a third of all degrees in computer science were awarded to women, yet only a tiny minority (3%) get tenured positions in computer science departments. This could be expected to have been even more the case in the earlier days of Internet usage.
The gendered distribution of skill, technical and availability factors may also mean that as some aspects of Internet use tend to require more competency than others (downloading and configuring software for IRC for example), it is possible that some domains of Internet life will continue to remain primarily male for some time. It may also be the case that many newer Internet users may not be aware of aspects of Internet life such as IRC, mailing lists, newsgroups and so on as they are not provided by their ISPs, and they have little means of discovering them. Some of the bigger ISPs such as AOL, may also have an interest in keeping people within the chatrooms they enable, and within the software they provide, in order to maintain a person's allegiance to what is a comparatively expensive Internet connection.
There may also be other reasons for these population disparities, which are embedded in the kinds of relationships people have offline. Colyer (nd) quotes Ellen Ullman as suggesting that fewer women than men participate in online communication because "for women, online messages constitute one means of communication among many, one type of relationship among many. Maybe this is why there are fewer of us online: We already have company. For the men, their online messages are their relationships" (Ullman 1996, 10). I am not entirely sure that it has been demonstrated that men have more relationships online than offline, or that the nature of those relationships change, but there is some evidence (which shall be discussed below) that some men find greater intimacy with women possible online than offline.
The proportion of males and females posting can change, not only with the kind of Internet venue, but also over time. At the 'beginning' of Internet life, by far the majority of people online were male, and we could suppose that many conventions of Internet life where established in conformity with modes of communicating or behaving employed among those males offline. It might be expected that these factors would tend to keep women out, by putting them in unfamiliar or uncomfortable idioms. But we might also expect that as more women came online, these conventions might well be replaced with others which were more encouraging to women. Thus it is not surprising that Colyer found that the active population of women on the mailing list Cinema-L had increased when she returned after a three year break She writes:
"Overall, 49% of the messages were from males and 47% were from females. Seven list members each posted 50 or more messages during the month: four females and three males... The average percentage of messages per day posted to the list by females during April 1996, 47%, was more than double the 23% I had documented during April 1993... although more male than female participants had posted messages to the list over the course of the month (118 males to 73 females), female posters who did contribute had averaged a higher number of messages during that time period: 11 messages each, compared to seven each for males".
This would seem to be the opposite to what I observed on Cybermind after coming back to the list in 2000 after leaving in late1998 [[?????]], though there is other evidence, which will be described later, suggesting that women may make more comments per person than males, even though the males make more comments.
Population and its various proportions on Cybermind is covered elsewhere in this introduction
Harassment
Another factor often used to explain the relative absence of visible women, is the fact of harassment - a person recognised as a woman may well be subject to continual requests for sex, subject to open hostility, or subject to continual demands that she prove her gender. Campbell (1994), as one example, describes what happens to a man when he uses a woman's account to get free access to a BBS. Immediately on logging on, he received 31 requests from one male (Jeff), whose message descriptions repeatedly included 'sex' and with whom he had had no prior contact. Another man sent him his phone number. He began to chat with this second male, but when he found he did not know how to leave the chat he was made subject to patronising comments. Other men also started to request chat, and Jeff abused him for standing him up.
Likewise La Pin and Bharadwaj write: (maybe quoting from Bruckman check. Still not sure)
"Female-presenting characters, no matter what the gender of their users, are often subject to harassment, challenges to 'prove' they are female, unwanted offers of help, 'babying' by male-presenting characters. Female characters are singled out on the basis of their gender or a female-sounding name for unwanted attention (offers of equipment, money, information, similar to 'picking up the check after a RL dinner') and sexual advances (for 'payment' of said dinner). This special treatment perpetuates the common misconception that female characters are weak or helpless; not only can it be damaging to female self-esteem and competence, it creates an uncomfortable atmosphere just as it does in real life".
Bruckman suggests that "Perhaps more damaging than unwanted sexual advances are unrequested offers of assistance", because they imply that women are automatically less competent, and less capable of acting independently. She quotes a female MOOer "The constant assumption that women need help can be damaging to a woman's sense of self esteem and competence". We shall see that in online computer games it is often reported that female presenting players can get more help than male presenting ones, though some people find that this is not the case.
There is no reason to think that such behaviour is not uncommon on BBS, MOOs and IRC, though anecdotally it may be less marked on Mailing Lists and Newsgroups - perhaps because the opportunities for private netsex following on from an exchange are thought to be less.
Communication styles [This section may be deleted following the writing of a paper by another person].
There is also research which suggests that male and female ways of communication (whether inherent or socialised) may tend to disadvantage women in these kinds of contexts. The main researcher in this field is Susan Herring (who summarises her own research in Herring 2000).
Herring (1993), starts by restating that it has frequently been argued that online communication should negate gender because of the absence of overt gender markers, the ability to use false names, the possibility of anonymity, the absence of overt physical violence, supposedly democratic and anarchic traditions and (perhaps in contradiction to this supposed irrelevance) the ability of women to organised themselves into women only lists. However this potential for absence of gender as status marker and the potential for equal communication has apparently not eventuated in many cases. Herring's own studies of two mailing lists Linguist, and Mega-Byte University bear out her claims. It should be noted that although this work was fairly early, and things might have been expected to change over time, Herring has not found any different results. "Women constitute 36% of LINGUIST and 42% of MBU subscribers", yet when Herring analysed both a discussion on sexism, and a discussion of a general theoretic import, on each list she found that:
"women constituted only 30% of the participants in these [sexism] discussions on both lists, and in the 'theoretical' discussions, only 16% of the participants were women. Furthermore, the messages contributed by women are shorter, averaging a single screen or less, while those of men average one and a half times longer in the 'sexism' discussions, and twice as long in the 'theoretical' discussions, with some messages ten screens or more in length. Thus while a short message does not necessarily indicate the sex of the sender, a very long message invariably indicates that the sender is male....[M]essages posted by women consistently received fewer average responses than those posted by men. In the MBU 'sexism' discussion, 89% of male postings received an explicit response, as compared with only 70% of those by women; on LINGUIST, the disparity is even greater. Interestingly, it is not only men who respond more often to men, but women as well".
It is possible that women participated, in general on the list in more cases than these figures suggest - there was no longer term research done by Herring on either of these lists. It should also be noted that on three occasions Herring found that "women's rate of posting increased gradually to where it equalled 50% of the contributions for a period of one or two days" - which suggests, given the proportions of the population, that those women who were posting were individually actually posting more than were the men. However, she writes that on those occasions the reaction "was virtually identical in all three cases: a handful of men wrote in to decry the discussion, and several threatened to cancel their subscription to the list". Which implies, perhaps, that some men could not cope with such a visible female presence.
In general Herring states that:
"Men were found to contribute most often to discussions of issues, followed by information postings (i.e. where they provided information, solicited or otherwise), followed by queries and personal discussions. Women, on the other hand, contributed most to personal discussions (talk about linguists, as opposed to talk about linguistics), followed by queries soliciting advice or information from others, with issues and information postings least frequent".
Herring further proposed that men and women's language differs in the proportions of the following features found in their speech acts.
WOMEN'S LANGUAGE MEN'S LANGUAGE
attenuated assertions strong assertions
apologies self-promotion
explicit justifications presuppositions
questions rhetorical questions
personal orientation authoritative orientation
supports others challenges others
humour/sarcasm
Ferris (1996: 30) summarises Poynter's account of a similar list of differences in communication as follows:
"Interruption: men interrupt women and not vice-versa in mixed-sex conversation.
Topic choice: men may (and do) reject women's topic choices in mixed-sex conversation, while women will talk on topics raised by men.
Speech act choice and realization: men use many more commands than women and tend to realize them congruently by means of the mood choice.
Imperative: Women ...are much more likely to realize them incongruently, by using the
Interrogative (Would you mind shutting the door?) ...or Declarative (I wonder if you would be so kind as to shut the door) .
Hedges: women use more 'hedges' than men
Slang: men use more slang than women.
Swearing: even more than slang, this has been regarded as men's territory.
Politeness markers: women are said to use these more than men.
Intonation: among other characteristics, women have more vocal variety than men and are said to use the high rising termination, or question inflection, more than men. (pp. 70-73)."
Further she writes: "Women display a greater personal orientation than men, focusing on the self, revealing thoughts and feelings, and interacting with others... women use conversation primarily for negotiating and expressing relationships, while men use it as display. Men want to establish control, while women want to maintain interaction. Women are also relationally more focused on positive interaction and cooperation, thus being more socially supportive".
It should be noted that neither Ferris nor Herring find it necessary take the further step of explaining the cause of these differences. It may not be intended, but Herring's work tends to imply that she might regard these as universal features of male and female language use, rather than those differences employed by Americans.
In an examination of 261 messages on Linguist, Herring found that these differences were statistically significant.
"Sixty-eight percent of the messages produced by women contained one or more features of women's language, as compared with only 31% of those produced by men. In contrast, 48% of the messages produced by men contained features of only men's language, as compared with 18% of women's messages. Interestingly, while the majority of women's messages (46%) combined a mixture of male and female rhetorical features, the fewest men's messages (14%) combined features".
This latter result suggests that gendered style of communication does not absolutely depend on gender of the poster but on the gender of the majority of the list members or perhaps on the majority of visible posters. "Thus men on women's special interest lists attenuate their assertions and shorten their messages, and women, especially on male-dominated lists such as LINGUIST and PAGLIA-L, can be contentious and adversarial". In other words people of the 'non-dominant' gender on the list will tend to mix their styles, adding features more usually employed by the other gender to their posts.
Ferris, in a study using an absurdly small sample of 25 messages, agrees with Herring that males tend to set topics, write longer posts, and swear more often - often explicitly sexually. She also suggests that posts from women tended to be more like dialogue (they would paste in the other person's message), while men wrote expositions. This is not something I have found to be the case. However, although 'pasting' is probably not gendered, it might be that intertwining pasting with comment, versus simply pasting the previous message in at the beginning or ending of one's mail might be gendered.
In the section on the 'statistics of Cybermind, I shall attempt to show that some of these proportions of communication can change and are not inherent to the medium. However, I found it, exceedingly difficult to evaluate communication styles, in any kind of consistent manner, but hope that someone else might be able to do this. What is a flame, or an assertion is often apparently a matter of opinion.
Clearly these kinds of results given by Herring and Ferris, are consistent with the expectations held about gendered behaviour in the offline Western English speaking world.
These kinds of results and expectations also affect arguments about the relation between speech and censorship. While the lack of constraints on male communication style, could be seen as censorship of women, and proved by the lesser levels of female activity, it is a fairly common argument that any attempt to restrict male speech, in terms of its style, would be an infringement of free speech and amount to censorship. However as Ess remarks this latter kind of argumentation depends upon the idea that freedom depends upon the absence of any restraints. This kind of freedom would not be allowed in any kind of society, as there are always some kinds of restraints and rules whereby people can understand one another - to violate the rules of language and talk gibberish unintelligible to others, is really only possible in a restricted series of environments. Similarly, we may not be supposed to simply kill those we disagree with (if they are recognised as part of the same community).
However these kinds of arguments for supposedly unimpeded communication, are very closely connected to ideas of authenticity, to ideas that people are only really expressing themselves when they do so strongly, or without thought of others. This then qualifies as genuine speech. 'Polite' communication is thus perceived, within this framework, as not only inauthentic, and thus untrue, but as a waste of time.
As Ess suggests we can see this kind of freedom as not only contradictory, as to be free, you *have* to do what others don't want you to do, but also "given the stress on human freedom as freedom from constraints--community can only be interpreted as relationships which restrict individual freedom: the more free one is, the more one is free from community". But without others there is nothing to rebel against, so there is then no evidence of freedom. Ess's argument is that there is always restriction, and if that restriction allows the participation of others and the expanding of those who can enter discourse, then it is not inherently bad.
However, other research has not been quite so confirming of Herring.
Savicki et al made a study of "a total of 2692 messages sent by 1208 different individuals in 27 different online discussion groups". The gender composition of the groups was that: "two groups were all male, 25 groups had more men than women, 10 groups had more members with indeterminate gender than women, only one group had roughly equal distribution of men and women, no group had a majority of women". They found that "subjects in groups with lower proportions of males did use more self-disclosure and more attempts at tension prevention and reduction. ... [However,] there was no relation of use of opinion, apology, questions, or 'we' pronouns to group gender composition".
In a series of experiments conducted in a laboratory setting and using dyadic communication on ICQ (all factors which might be expected to influence the result" Hatt concluded that:
"Only one main effect was found for gender, females were found to use a significantly higher proportion of intense adverbs than males". However "males used a significantly higher proportion [of] unpleasant passive words than females (Mmales=.011, Mfemales=.07; F1,70=3.962, p=.05, eta2=.05) when discussing success at University. However, no significant differences existed between males and females when discussing relationships". "only one main effect for gender and 7 main effects for conversation type existed for the language features examined".
Interestingly people who regularly used the Internet where more prone to use emotional references and less prone to use personal pronouns than those who did not. On the whole Hatt concluded that "one may consider the influence of gender on language to be more dynamic than has traditionally viewed. Gender could be considered to have a fluctuating salience based on a variety of other influences such as context and mode of communication used". In another experiment people were asked to guess the gender of transcripts of gender neutrally named texts. Hatt remarks that the "guessing process was essentially random".
Effect of Topic and Environs
Topic of the list and the presence of more women on the list may influence the kinds of discourse entered into. After further research Herring wrote (1994):
"It wasn't until I started looking at lists devoted to women's issues, and to traditionally 'feminized' disciplines such as women's studies, teaching English as a second language, and librarianship, that I found women holding forth in an amount consistent with their numerical presence on the list. I also found different interactional norms: little or no flaming, and cooperative, polite exchanges".
It is also possible that the apparent preponderance of male discourse modes can be alleviated by other policies. For example King claims that Echo, a NY based computer group, which encourages face to face interactions between groups of members, is largely devoid of these distinctions:
"the mixed-gender discussion areas of Echo are not dominated by men. Anyone can start and pursue a discussion -- indeed many discussions have been continuing for years. Echo, however, may be a unique case since it was founded by a woman, Stacy Horn. Horn has strived through the years to maintain a near equal balance of men and women. In addition, she provides training and mentoring to women who wish to participate. (Shade 1993 and Echo discussions) Therefore, Echo has gained a reputation as a women-friendly space while not resorting to women-only membership.""At Echo, half the members are women; in addition, half of the discussion moderators are also women -- the common model is for each discussion area to have a male and female moderator. This helps ensure equitable participation and even-handed enforcement of the rules".
Furthermore Trias, has wondered if the kinds of results described by Herring were actually a result of studying asynchronous communication, and wondered if the results might be different in MOOs or IRC. She studied 487 minutes of the IRC channel #atheism from January to April of 1997, and concluded that men seemed to spend more time online and thus produced more messages in total, but that women produced more messages per minute than men.
There may be some factors which change these kinds of balances depending on the online environment. Herring notes (2000):
"Males and females tend to participate more equally in chat environments, both in terms of number of messages and average message length (Herring 1999). On average, response rates to males and females are also more balanced; if anything, females tend to receive more responses to their messages than males".
Hoai-An Truong, et al (c.1993) write that "On-line services which stress community such as Seniornet, Echo and the WELL (the WELL has between 15-20% women users) attract higher numbers of women".
Ferris: remarks that the FeMiNa (1996) survey found that 43% of 1150 women respondents considered community an important reason for going on-line (specifically, 13% stated that their main reason for going on-line was for a sense of community, while an additional 30% stated that their main reason was to communicate (through e-mail).
These supposed differences have also been research with children's internet usages. Shade (1993) writes:
"Kathleen Michel of Miami University investigated gender differences in KIDCAFE, a networking project that links children around the world. Michel was interested in finding out if boys and girls talked to each other more often using CMC, and, if the medium let them understand each other better. In particular, she sought to apply linguist Deborah Tannen's theories of the gender differences in conversational styles-- the 'rapport' (cooperative, intimate style) versus 'report' (information giving) styles of talk. (Generally speaking, more women engage in the 'rapport' style; more men the 'report' style). She concluded that, although boys and girls have different conversational patterns, the styles are not as discrepant as Tannen would indicate. CMC can have very positive effects for school children, she observed: "By linking students to other peers around the world through a computer network, schools can positively effect the ways in which male and females converse, and can open up more opportunities for cross-gender communication...on-line , social status and gender become less obvious differences and extend the boundaries of the student's community. A student doesn't have to break into a clique or take social risks in order to hold a conversation with someone she or he normally would not talk to". [Michel (1992). "Gender differences in computer-mediated conversations". {available via KIDLINK}]"
Hoai-An Truong, et al (c.1993) write that "Les Radke, who teaches a computer class at Richmond High, finds that in his class boys gravitate towards computer games, while girls use e-mail and read USENET".
Jenkins argues that even if the kinds of descriptions that Herring makes are true then "e-mail or Internet Relay Chat are private, contained between two (or more) select individuals. As Cameron notes, "private uses of language, confined to the space of home, family and immediate community" such as gossip, journal-keeping, or letter writing, are associated more with women than with men (998:3).
"In my own experience, with the Friends List for example, most of the messages could be considered frivolous. The men on the list tend to dominate the conversations, largely because more men than women on the list are constantly linked to the Internet and are continuously monitoring their e-mail. It is actually the men on the list who are more likely to initiate gossipy conversations, for instance, discussing the activities of friends not on the list, while the many of the more serious, academic conversations are begun by the women".
These kinds of factors are even more relevant if people use the net for communicating with family and friends, or if expanding their field of friendship. Though this replicates the expected 'public/private' division of life and its associations with male and female Jenkins reports that "more than half of the women surveyed use computer technology to communicate with relatives. However, it is worth noting that nearly 40% of the men in the sample reported communication with their relatives, so it appears that this task is not as strictly gender-linked as might have been believed".
Furthermore as Kaplan and Farell noted as early as 1994 in their study of a group of teenage girl users of bulletin boards, girls may use the Internet precisely as a way of extending or developing their offline social lives (#18). "the degree to which electronic life permeates the daily habits and activities of these women is perhaps the most fascinating, and the most distinguishing, characteristic of the electronic community they have joined. For them, material ("real") life is entirely continuous with virtual life" (#29).
Of course these kinds of remarks do not render the observations we have been describing less accurate, but they do add the possibility of complexity.
Women only lists.
As a result of these kinds of numerical and social discrepancy some people have set up Women only lists [anyone know if these are proportionately more or less common than they used to be?]
As early as 1993 Borg explained the existence of the mailing list Systers to discuss issues faced by women in computing disciplines - "the unique problems that women face when they enter the field and as they progress and advance". The theory was that "Exposing women to the full range of significant interactions among women, without the perception of help or input from men, serves to bolster self esteem and independence".
Borg appears to assume different styles of communication between men and women of the type described above, and that Systers is as a result a co-operative and low flame environment. Were men to be allowed in then she feels they would dominate. This low flame environment, however seems to require the presence of a strong moderator (Borg herself), "committed to the encouragement of productive discussion and willing to stop unproductive argument". So, given this strong moderation, it becomes debateable how much the style of the group depends upon group member gender or upon the moderator.
Borg also feels it is necessary to defend Systers from the possible charge of monopolising information, and stresses that information is often made public (though she does not say how this occurs).
Hall describes how the problem of identifying people on another female only list as being of female gender became a major issue, and sometimes people were accused of being male because of their writing style.
A women's only list was set up for members of Cybermind and FutureCulture, which will be discussed later on. However the prevailing secrecy about this list makes it extremely difficult to research.
Women on the Web
The way gender is used and reacted to online may also affect peoples usage of the World Wide Web.
For example Kibby (1997) describes a web site which evaluated women web users by their attractiveness of their photos to the male author of this site. However as Kibby implies, to some extent the possibility of this kind of evaluation was increased by the tendency of women web users to portray themselves in sexualised terms. Kibby writes:
"Given that computer mediated communication arguably affords women the opportunity to present themselves in ways which are not bound by such categories as 'sex object', and facilitates the presentation of a self that existed independently of the sexed body, why on so many women's home pages was the sexualised body chosen as a primary image of self?".
On some CU-CME portals women "predominantly depict themselves through a shot of their breasts; framing their clothed, semi-nude or naked torso from shoulder to waist. Rarely do they include their faces in the frame". Kibby suggests that "while this new medium allows the possibility of creating a new genderless self, the tools of creation are still those of a gendered society" and that "Women present a sexualised self on their home pages because for them sexuality and identity are not easily separated, and nor is such a separation desired". This apparent tendency for women to anchor their identity more in their body and its appearance than is usually done by men, shall be examined later in the section on the 'cyberbody'.
Arnold and Miller have also researched home pages in two studies. In the first study they found that textually
"men's pages were shorter, that there was more variety in length and self-reference in women's pages, and that women made more reference to the reader and seemed to be showing more awareness of those who would be viewing their pages than men did. All of these seem to show more concentration on individualised communication with others in women's pages, compared with more standardised self-presentation in men's pages" (1999).
In the second study they concentrated on the web pages of people who were quite well known in the person's area of research. They found that
"Often amongst the women (though we suspect in some cases with heavy irony) there was a 'feminine' style of self image, but we have not found any women's pages that use jokey pictures of themselves, as some men do. Nor were women's presentations as overtly confident as on some of the men's sites".
When people used substitute images for personal photos "in the cyberspace equivalent of 'fluffy ' feminine (such as the use of a substitute picture eg 'flowers') compared to technical 'images' (eg a computer) used by men". Women also tended to give full CVs , honours and memberships of professional bodies, on their front pages more than men.
Arnold and Miller further report (2000) that though women academics were ambivalent about using photographs on their web sites they tended to say that they liked finding photographs on other women's web sites. Arnold and Miller also open up further avenues for research by adding that "it was common for women to express some surprise that, upon reflection, they were able to discover the extent to which their interactions were 'gendered' in some way.... Most respondents volunteered that they were not 'neutral' in their approach to gender in their use of the Web and many had noticed at a practical level that patterns of use, time spent and range of uses, were possibly different for them compared to their male colleagues". Which raises questions about different gendered behaviour when using the web, or in looking for data.
"As Allen Weiner, vice president of analytical services for NetRatings summarizes it, 'Men tend to flock to news and information sites that present deep and rich information while women gravitate toward sites that provide topics related to health and well-being, with an accent on efficient use'.('Web Gender Gap Narrows as More Women Go Online-Survey,' Reuters January 25, 2000; (report of the year-end Nielsen/NetRatings) http://www.foxnews.com/vtech/0120/t_rt_0120_71.sml). Feminist[s] can have a field day analyzing his characterization -- why are news sites 'deep and rich', but health sites aren't??" (Weisbard).
Weisbard also writes that
"Stanford's Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society, for example, did a study released in February, 2000, on the effects of the Internet on daily life ('Study of the Social Consequences of the Internet', February 17, 2000, http://www.stanford.edu/group/siqss/Press_Release/internetStudy.html) It noted few areas of gender differences. One was similar to the marketing information - it found that men are more likely than women to look up stock options and buy stocks online. But overall, gender differences in access and use were slim. Education and age were much more significant factors affecting access ('Differences in Rate of Internet Access: Effects of Age, Education, Gender, Race/Ethnicity, Income' chart http://www.stanford.edu/group/siqss/Press_Release/Chart15.gif); where there were gender differences in access, they were mainly among unemployed men and women. In terms of usage, the researchers concluded that once people were connected, all demographic factors amounted to only six per cent variation in how much or what they use the Internet for".
Given the issues which have lead to the formation of women only lists, it is not unexpected that there are also some very specific 'women only websites' or sites which are written by women for women. It is, however, currently difficult to exclude a person from looking at a public website by their gender, although it is possible to set up a 'private' website by requesting membership and the use of passwords, with evidence of gender provided to the website's owners.
For example the Cybergrrl website began in January 1995 as Aliza Sherman's personal home page. Sherman formed the Webgrrls webring linking together "women centered websites", this came to function as a network for women in the Internet industry with "webchapters in 107 cities all over the world". The original site is now [?date] a media company with 14 workers. The web site contains a Cybergrrl Village which is a moderated message board for members, in which the staff have control over who posts and what is posted (Ladendorf nd).
[[How do people use women only web sites? What for?]]
Organising women via the Internet
It has often been hoped that the Internet would enable disempowered groups to organise and to better interact with the political structures of their State. This naturally extends to women's groups.
One early study of women using the Internet was written by Balka and Doucette (1994). It focused on women in Newfoundland Canada in 1992. The authors cite the usual work which suggested that online computers will provide a decentralised network which enable democratic and participatory access for previously unheard voices. As they write "At issue is whether communications technology reinforces existing social relations or allows for social transformation and new social formations" (#24). In carrying out their investigations they collected data which:
"describes a) existing access to computer and telecommunication resources in women's groups and groups serving women; b) current organizational structure and staffing arrangements of these potential users of a computer network; c) patterns of computer use anticipated by women's organizations and actual computer use and maintenance patterns; d) the level of interest in and need for computer networking resources; and e) informational material available for possible inclusion in a database of holdings. In addition, we completed a review of existing computer networking resources available in the province, with an emphasis on the institutional relationships that might affect the accessibility of these networks to women's organizations" (#29).
They found that "71.3% (n=92) of the groups responding to the survey had access to one or more personal computers" (#33), "Groups with no paid staff had access to computer equipment in 50.9% of cases (n=29)...... 87.5% of groups with paid staff (n=63) had access to computer equipment," (#39). "In 96.4% of cases where a group owned the computer equipment it used (n=53), the group also had paid staff. In contrast, in only 3.6% percent of cases where computer equipment used by a group was owned by a group (n=2), were no paid staff present. (#43)
This implies that those organisations which had some kind of recognition or income were the ones who were, at that time, the best able to use computers. However, again at that time, few of those groups with computers had access to the Internet or other computer network.
"Although 71.8% of groups (n=92) had access to a computer, only 28.7% of our population (n=37), representing 39.8 % of those with access to a computer, have access to a modem, which is required in order to utilize a computer network.... ". They also found that though many groups claimed to have access to email, they were unable to give their email address in a recognisable or valid form. They comment that when computers were introduced, it was often the case that the potential users were not actually instructed in how to use them, so as a result people either shied away from the machines or taught themselves."We asked those groups that had used a computer network to indicate what they had used a computer network for. Responses were varied. The activities mentioned fell into several categories, which included electronic mail and general, unspecified information exchange (5 groups); sending local messages between offices (3 groups); communication within the province (4 groups); communication with branch offices in other provinces (1 group); interprovincial communication (other than with head office), (1 group); international communication (1 group); file transfer (4 groups); consultation of resource library (4 groups); consultation of databases, including Statistics Canada (3 groups); general access to research/information sources (1 group); bulletin board type use (1 group); educational usage (participation in a distance course) (1 group). In addition, one group noted that they could use an electronic mail or message system, but did not. Thus, although only a small percentage of our population was at the time of the survey using computer networking facilities, of those, 41.4% (n=12) were using the ACOA/Enterprise Network" (#56).
It is not specified whether the groups who did use computer networks found them to be helpful in pursuing their work, and whether they did give them the feeling of more power. To some extent, it might be expected that the more people had access to such networks the more important they would become.
Shade (1996) has written on the difficulty women's groups in Canada found in getting funding for linking up via networks. Perhaps because it was felt by the conservative government that such linkage was unnecessary, or perhaps because the government actually feared giving voice, or organisational capacity, to parties which might disagree with its politics.
At the moment there does not seem to be much evidence that using the Internet has changed much of the nature of offline world gender politics, but this may partially be because interaction between the genders online in some way reinforces offline gender divisions.
Men Online
The question arises, of if it is possible for men to use the internet to change their expression of gender. In general it is doubtful whether 'gender impersonation' gives much experience of gender flexibility, as people will tend to use gender cliches to indicate their 'false' gender, though it is conceivable that some experience of how women are treated in online forums, may have some salutary effects. So ignoring these issues of impersonation, how might being online affect males.
Bennett (1998) used a sample of six men "to explore the way in which the electronic world may be utilised to provide a positive environment where men can openly discuss emotional issues which they have previously been reluctant to discuss in the 'real' world". Her subjects ranged from 21 to 75 years of age, 4 came from the US, one from the UK and one was an American living in Australia, 3 were married. The sample is small, but the results are suggestive.
Bennett instances Robin Lakoff as arguing that "men are more likely to be direct communicators, i.e. aggressive and forceful, whereas women are more indirect communicators, valuing rapport, relationships and tone of voice over clarity". Although this remark ignores the context of interaction, it is probable that men are likely to be indirect when talking of emotions, and women direct when talking of such things. Partly this might be because male identity as constructed in the modern west is threatened by the apparent opposition between reason or control and emotion, it may also be that males devalue their emotions when those emotions are not of a particular type (it may be acceptable, or excused, for a male to be angry, but not to cry). In male ideology women's connection with emotion may seem to be weakness, at the same time as it might be desirable.
Bennet was surprised at the amount of openness which her project generated. One informant claimed he had told her things which he had "given very little, if any, thought to, let alone spoken to anyone close to me, not even my wife. Not that I wouldn't if she asked me, I think, but its something that men aren't really expected to need or desire".
Bennett recognises "the fact that I was a female researcher was of significant value with regards to the degree and type of data which was generated by participants". She quotes the following comments from her subjects:
"The fact that you were a female made it easier when you consider my views of man as an entity in today's society. I felt confident that I would not be judged and be able to offer what would be a different perspective. If you had been a male the content of my answers would not have changed but the amount of introspection and volunteered information may have been an issue of restraint (Victor, aged 41, 7July 1998)".
And
"Would I have said the same things to a male researcher? I would tentatively say probably not, although I can't say for certain as I have never been in that situation (Midori, aged 43, 17 August 1998)".
This suggests that western males may find it easier to intimate with a woman online, than they do offline, but it also suggests that levels of intimacy between males may not change. In other words, the offline intimacy as marked by gender are also reflected online, in fact this potential for intimacy may be exaggerated or magnified- it might also be useful to explore whether males are less intimate online with each other (perhaps because of the possibility of leaving 'evidence') than they are offline.
Gender as communication
These kinds of communication issues again direct us to look at the role of gender in communication. Paul Ten Have suggests that in order to function online with the vast range of people and possibilities various categories become important in finding who one wants to communicate with, given one's purpose in communication. Another way of putting this is that gender, among other factors, already gives people information about others. Gender already communicates, even if it miscommunicates, through people's use of categories to interpret others. Categories brought to bear to interpret others will change with the situation, or the framing of the dialogue. Of course people may bring incompatible frames to the same dialogue and have unexpected results.
"people, as an indispensable part of their social existence, are constantly using 'membership categories' to orient themselves and others in their dealings with one another. That is, a substantial part of the social knowledge that members of society use, is organized in terms of categories of persons.... Members count on each other in terms of those categories and the properties associated with them". (Ten Have).
So "how do people who want to 'chat' contact each other to discover whether the other fits their purpose? It seems that basic categories like age, sex and location, as well as more focussed, topic-related ones, play an essential role in getting chat-games started" (ten Have). Or as he says in the summary version of his paper: "people who want to chat rely mostly on categorical predications to find suitable chat partners".
Therefore people tend to ask questions which will normally elicit these kinds of categories. As Ten Have remarks, hence the commonness of the question "a/s/l?", or "What is your age, sex and location?", in chat rooms, particularly when people are seeking company rather than pursuing topics. In any case the answers to these kinds of question will give all kinds of cliched information about the person's likely behaviour. This information provides what we might call a guide for further behaviour or an anchor point. Strangely the common western question of "what do you do?" ie "what is your occupation or career and relative wealth" seems to be largely absent as an initial way of orienting behaviour online.
Interestingly, Ten Have declares that "One is tempted to distinguish a quick 'male' and a slower 'female' style of reaching the 'anchor point', although the fit with the (played at) gender is not perfect". This produces another question to research.
These kinds of researches have raised numerous problems, which hopefully we shall continue to investigate in this book.