http://www.geocities.com/jpmarshall.geo/cybermind/gender/UNSWgenderpaper.rtf
UNSW PAPER (Summary of work on online gender) Jon Marshall
Introduction 
This paper is an introduction to the problems and research involving online gender, and an outline of my current research project.  Firstly I'll make some remarks about gender in the contemporary world, and the relationship between gender, technology and history. Then I'll describe some common net folklore, some previous research, and relate that to my research on the mailing list Cybermind. Finally I'll describe the proposed research.  One factor to be emphasised is that online life is not divorced from offline life. They interact in a multiplicity of ways, and the ambiguities of their interaction is a vital part of the phenomenology of 'virtual life'. Obviously this is a big set of topics and I can't possibly summarise everything that is relevant, so I ask for some degree of tolerance.

Gender in the Modern World
Gender online is a complex issue. It involves not only the special features of life online, together with the importation and modification of offline gender behaviour, but also those contexts of gender in the offline world which influence our activities, and our access to computers in general and to online life in particular.  These issues are further complicated by gender behaviours in the West (at least) appearing to be in an almost constant state of flux and interrogation, and it is not surprising that these interrogations and challenges occur online - although it is not clear by how much they are extended. As Kuni remarks, "the Net is a contested zone, and… this fact must be part of our  awareness as we work on it" (q 'Faith' 1999).
Gender, as manifested through social phenomena, is not a thing in itself but appears within a process, and creates a process of the interaction of people classified as male and female (and occasionally as 'other'), with their own particular categories, forces, routines and assumptions.  The relevance of gender may vary with different contexts.  Gender is something which appears to both enable, and to restrict, behaviour - it is neither merely positive or merely negative.  Gender here is not being used as a codeword for female - gender tends to exist, in our societies as an ideal pair, from which things blend or fall away. It is common to theorise gender either as an 'accident' in the Aristotelean sense, a performance, or as something essential.  In most people's actual lives it seems to be treated as an essential, and is certainly used as a guide as to how to react to others.  A performance can also be a manifestation of something held to be essentially true, it should not imply automatic fictiveness, or liberated play.  An actor or a musician is not entirely free to do as they choose, even if they have no script or score, if they want to achieve particular kinds of results. 
We should not assume that either gender necessarily form a uniform group with similar interests and problems, whatever the importance of gender to the society it manifests within. Gender has different meanings, and can create different problems within differing groups (or classes) of men and women. The interests and lives of wealthy men, may not entirely correspond to those of poor men; the interests and lives of women in Thailand may not entirely correspond to the interests of women in Saudi Arabia; the interests of corporate women may not entirely correspond to those of academic women and so on. It may be that women and men of certain groups have more in common with, or identify more closely with, those of the other gender who belong to those groups than they do with those of their own gender who belong to other groups. This kind of issue cannot be decided beforehand, it must be investigated.  Likewise, whatever the public view of the subject, it cannot be assumed, that men posses all of the power in a society, or that women do not act to subvert or avoid that power, or do not have various powers of their own.  Power appears within a set of relationships, it manifests in a kind of ratio between people and groups, rather than a thing which is possessed and brought to bear on the unresisting.  Often the power is fogged and unclear, even if dominant.  Such a proposition does not deny that by all kind of measures most men may be better off than most women, but that we should observe how the genders actually do interact in particular social groups, without assuming that the 'subordinate' is powerless, or always subordinate.
A major function of gender in Western English speaking societies seems to appear in relation to intimacy or family (love and kinship), as well as in relationship to status and occupation.  Kinship, itself, tends to be justified by a set of feelings, and the heterosexual pair bond has become the generative atom of Western kinship. It is this relation to intimacy, which may have the most influence on life online, once people actually get online - although supposed gender based styles of language use, or of power relations are also often held to be important. 
In the offline world gender is embedded in a wide spread and apparently largely accurate discourse about a 'decline' in 'The Family' and in 'The Community'.  Separation between kin groups through distance, work (or lack of work), divorce, rising age of first marriage, increasing numbers of one person households, the lack of integrating roles, or lack of mutual trust from a standard story.  The decline in State support as services and money are shifted to the corporate sector, renders most people's situation even more insecure, as there are few kin, or local, ties to 'fall back on'.  It is usually agreed that this situation hits women's survival harder, although it also may produce more emotional isolation in men.  People nowadays enter into a large variety of household arrangements, and may seek to replace uncertain kin ties by negotiating temporary ties with non related people - even kin ties may depend on some kind of negotiation. Such negotiated ties are often not with neighbours, but with others who are defined as similar, or who are met in groups.  People seek out ties.
Wuthnow claimed in 1994 that 40% of American adults are members of small groups which meet regularly to provide support for members (1994: 45-50).  There seems little reason not to assume the percentage is even larger now.  Wuthnow argues that these small groups fit in with our social life: allowing people to adapt, to separate from other people or positions, and to cope with the stress of life or work. They do not necessarily require people to adjust or change their lifestyles, or to publicly protest at their alienation from society (ibid: 12, 21-5).
I shall argue that women, in particular, feature in people's attempts to deal with these kinds of problems, and that online groups, constitute another form of support and contact making - although the support they offer can be limited - and that gender features in online groups in ways which manifest similarities to its features offline although in a more exaggerated format.  Construction of a private and intimate world, has become the way people attempt to deal with the vagaries of an alienated and isolated public world.

Gender, Technology and History
Offline world issues of gender also affects access to the online world, but these matters are complex and possibly more in flux than they once were.  To some extent the usual questions of education (such as issues of exclusion of women, or incompatibility with gendered self-image or experience - both male and female) may be irrelevant as computers become household appliances in middle class homes.  We do not have to be mechanics to drive cars, nor programmers to use computers.  Some research has suggested that class and age are actually far more influential as preventers of Internet usage than gender (#####).  
As everyone knows, it is extremely difficult to give accurate figures for the numbers of people online, and even harder to give figures for people by gender.  However, all the estimates I have seen suggest that not only have the numbers of people online been increasing rapidly, but the proportion of women and men has been approaching equality in the Western English Speaking World. That it has not in other parts of the world, indicates that offline cultural factors are still important here.
Important factors here, include the gendered history of technology and computing and the ways that competences and familiarities are distributed, considerations about the appropriateness of either gender communicating openly outside a restricted field (perhaps issues of public power for women, and intimate confession for men), issues of what we might call the 'public' and the 'private' (which when conceived of as a polarity set up all kinds of paradoxes).  There are also more subtle symbolic factors such as the oscillation between cyborgisation and etherealisation, or the interaction between the biologic, the spiritual and the machinic, or between reason, emotion and intuition  (which I won't be going into today).  These factors mean that the Internet started off being made by males for males, and probably carried gendered customs (not necessarily explicitly) and was based on gendered familiarities, which made it harder for women to use.  The inexplicit nature of these gendered customs, and probably their denial as being gendered, might make them exceedingly hard to challenge - they would become a kind of uncomfortable fog.
There may also be issues involving the inertia of technology, that previous decisions influence the possibilities of further development.  Technology is built into an existing framework, but has the potential to alter that framework.  The factors which influence this dynamic framework also influence gender, and are influenced by it - everything influences everything else - divisions are more analytic than real.  
It is more than conceivable that this history plus the relatively rapid colonisation of the net, and of computers, by women and 'non-tech-outsiders' would have set up all kinds of changes and defensive actions amongst the Internet's original inhabitants - the wide spread condemnation of people who hailed from AOL, during the 90s, being an obvious case.  Twenty years ago middle class women could exist without much interaction with computers, today this is much more difficult.  It means that much research on gender has the problem of becoming history before it gets published.

Online Folklore
	Online folklore about gender is fairly well known, so I'll only briefly describe it.  The fact that it is folklore, and common, does not mean its untrue, and many of these stories can be documented by reference to academic writing - indeed many people online refer to academic writing to make a folkloric point - we cannot assume that academic writing is free of the same assumptions and tropes as online writing.  By calling these stories folklore I mean no more than that they are common and repeated.  
Firstly there is the story that gender is unimportant online, that people can be free from gender to be themselves or as they choose to be. Mark Poster goes to the extreme of writing: "one may experience directly the opposite gender by assuming it and enacting it in conversations" (1977: 223), which seems a fairly straightforward confusion of a temporary imagining with a long term imposed.  Secondly there is the story that online life is full of cross gender impersonation, and that as a result interactions are potentially hedged with betrayal and disillusion.  These two stories seem a little contradictory in some ways - if gender is unimportant to online life, then how come it is such a source of worry and distress?  Partly this is the case because of the common trope that the online has to b verified by the offline - where gender is important.  But often, as is the case with much net discourse, the possible contradiction is hidden behind a discourse of futurity, in which we can discuss what the life on the Net might become, rather than what it is, or what it has been.  We can thus live in some kind of ideal and exciting, transformative world, instead of the relatively humdrum reality.  It is probably good for academic careers, and funding, to emphasise that we are dealing with something radically new and high tech.  Thirdly there is the story that women are less inclined to flame and argue than men, and are thus driven out of online groups by this 'lack'.  Fourthly, there are stories about continual harassment of women by men who are largely demanding netsex, and implications that this also makes online life difficult for women.
	Looking at these issues more circumspectly it appears that the first issue of radical gender freedom is contradicted by the evidence, and by the anxiety that the question of gender impersonation arouses - although we should note that it seems to be impersonation of women by men that causes the anxiety, not the other way around.  Also it seems that people online are generally confident that they can tell what gender someone really is, by that person's habits, or styles, of conversation - whether they use lots of emoticons for example.  It has been reported that people will read books on gender differences in speech to discover the gender identity of a person, who may also be reading the same books in order to fake better (###). Another purported gender detector might be a person's knowledge base - this knowledge base often being some kind of product knowledge such as pantyhose sizes for example.  American members of Cybermind who used this technique seemed surprised that such sizes where not universal and thus useless in detecting women from other countries - not to mention those women who do not wear panty hose.  The art of detecting women who pose as men is almost never discussed - it is not relevant.  When people select some gender neutral pronouns, it is generally not assumed the person is gender neutral and people will often seem to try and find out what their real gender is (Kendall 1996: 217). Some researchers have reported that people who maintain vagueness about 'real gender' are "generally 'dropped' from the interaction" (O'Brien 1999: 90).  In general people seem to work hard at detecting the gender of others, which implies it is not 'irrelevant', and it is worthwhile asking if this happens in particular circumstances alone.
	However even if this gender vagueness is the case, it does not mean that assumptions about gender are challenged. Indeed the cliches seem stronger.  At the same time as McRae argues in favour of the existence of radical gender freedom she remarks that if someone plays a woman and wants to "attract partners as 'female' [they] must craft a description within the realm of what is considered attractive" (ibid: 250).  They, must in other words, use cliches and probably exaggerations, and this may reinforce ideals of gender difference. Herring (2000) writes that she "found that nearly 90% of all gendered behavior in six IRC channels indexed maleness and femaleness in traditional, even stereotyped ways; instances of gender switching constituted less than half of the remaining 10%".  Kendall writes: "choosing one gender or another does nothing to change the expectations attached to particular gender identifications" (1996: 217).  The detection criteria we discussed earlier also seem fairly conventional. In fact, as you can ignore the gender of those who contradict expectations of gender then those expectations may grow stronger.  There is little evidence of any greater gender freedom, in the sense of a challenge to, or ignoring of, gender.
	Herring (2000) writes that "claims of widespread gender anonymity have not been supported by research on online interaction", and this appears relatively correct - it is rarer than we might think listening to stories. I have heard of only one case of deliberate 'gender impersonation' on Cybermind, and the precise circumstances surrounding that are unclear - though the indications are that the person, though anatomically male, thought of themselves as female. As far as I know this only became a problem when several female list members attempted to set up a women's only list and this person joined that list.  As far as I know, he/her was eventually accepted.
When Alan asked people on Cybermind about 'changing' gender (18 May.97), of 14 replies two implied it might be interesting to do but they hadn't.  One had done it to "explore theoretical issues", two chose to make themselves spivak on MOOs, and the rest couldn't be bothered.  Another discussion which arose in 2001 in response to comments about the widespread nature of gender impersonation seemed to give the same kinds of results. Thus Drew wrote
Out of dozens of people I've met online, 
not one has fictionalised their gender. 
Out of hundreds of people I know offline 
and who are online, not one has fictionalised their gender….
[[that is]] Excluding the usual experimental five minutes on lambda 
as the opposite gender before you get bored with it.

Alan likewise wrote:
I've met dozens of people (maybe well over 100) from Cybermind in real 
life and almost always they seem as if I've known them for a long time. 
I've never met anyone masquerading re: gender

In response to questions as to whether anyone had impersonated the other gender one list member wrote:
I impersonated a woman once in the one and only MUD I ever played in, but everyone wanted to have sex with me. I didn't feel comfortable misleading people (and I wasn't getting turned on by their lines anyways) so I just started telling everyone I was a guy.

Another wrote:
I had a male character on LambdaMOO for a very short while. I did it because I wanted to see what it is like to have a male character since I'd only had same-gendered characters. It was interesting. I had to constantly remind myself to use the male pronouns when referring to myself which was quite a trick. As I said, it was a short-lived experiment, primarily because it was boring as hell.

It seems possible that 'impersonation' occurs more frequently in MOOs and IRC than on Lists or in Newsgroups, and it probably varies with situation, perhaps being more common in gaming than elsewhere, when differently gendered characters can have different kinds of, usually cliched, advantages - either game designed, or from social factors.
On mailing lists, gender can often be read from the address which may give a common male or female name, or because over the course of time people will sign their posts with a common male or female name.  There are cases in which people (usually male) would react to a challenge that they were behaving in a 'male' way, by declaring that the challenger did not know what gender they really were - even if they had signed their name in the past.  Such objections were never taken with any degree of seriousness by other people.  This name visibility perhaps correlates with the lack of pseudonyms used on Cybermind (especially among frequent posters) and perhaps is true on lists in general, whereas on MOO, pseudonyms are standard and email addresses are usually hidden.  All the mailing lists, of which I have experience, tend to be places in which people attempt to manifest their 'real identity', rather than 'play with', or hide, identities.  An experimental attempt to start up a list of Cybermind members in which people appeared anonymously with no specified gender had a very short life.
That is not to say that cases of gender unclarity did not arise, but these seem to have been unintended, and arose largely because of conventional modes of reading gender.  In all known cases there was no specific intent.  In two cases, which were of males mistaken for females, the pseudonymous people involved had identified their real genders explicitly on many occasions.  In the cases of the males this seemed to invoke some degree of distress from those who had been reading them as females, while with the woman identified as male there was no particular expression at all.  In one of these cases, when a member of the US military expressed surprise at discovering the person's real gender and wrote that gender was fundamental to authenticity, claiming (23 Mar.95): "Sex cannot be removed from the persona, it IS who we are! (changers and crossers be damned!)", response was almost uniformly hostile.  Criticisms were frequently made in terms of authenticity and limitation. Amethist explains the strength of Cybermind's reaction as stemming from: "those who resist being limited and defined by gender based ideologies."  In this case gender was perceived by list members as accident or limit on authentic expression.
The big question about gender impersonation is, as we have said, why does it cause so much anxiety - especially if it is so rare, and people are so confident they can detect differences?  The answer would seem to be largely, from the stories told, when the interaction has been dyadic, when intimacy has been invoked, and when the supposedly female person is found to be male.  This is because in the offline world most intimate or open relationships, by definition, involve at least one woman.  Emotional or support bonding is female, male bonding has become almost suspect, particularly if it involves intimacy.  Finding out that a person you were intimate with was not female, almost  automatically changes the relationship from the realm of intimate and private into a kind of public betrayal.  Our private role and its vulnerabilities has broken into a the public male domain.
Related to this conflation of intimacy with women, is the story that women do not flame - they are supposed to be relational - and that therefore lists which have a large proportion of women tend to have less flames and are more harmonious - with the implication that people might be genderable by their propensity to flame, or that people might be interpreted as flaming depending on their gender (cf Baym 1995: 158). One of the reasons often given for the founding of women only lists has been to lower incidence of flame. However it is not always clear if this result arises because of the involvement of women alone, or because of strict control by the moderator.  In some cases it seems that women may be thrown off such lists for not behaving in an appropriately 'female' way - so the ideology becomes self reinforcing - excluding those who do conform.
Herring (1994) also writes "the simple fact of the matter is that it is virtually only men who flame". "Women and men have a different communication ethic, and male ethical ideals can be evoked to justify flaming".  However, in her research both men and women state that they do not particularly like flaming.  Witmer & Katzman concluded their statistical research on "newsgroups and special interest groups on the Internet and CompuServe", by writing that "The data do not support the... hypothesis that men use more challenging language and flame more often than women" (1998: 7, 9-10).  Research at a girls' School in Melbourne, was reported to show that girls had taken to the Internet to bully, exclude and intimidate each other (SMH 6 Oct 1998: 5).  
On Cybermind, women were perhaps as prone to flame as men.  However at the end of one such dispute in which all the major participants were female another women (probably a new list member) wrote in asking "Are women netters less likely to be flamethrowers? Are we marginalized on the net?".  Frequently on Cybermind if the people flaming or engaged in struggle were male, it would be mentioned, usually by a woman, that this was typical male behaviour.  In one case when it was commonly alleged that male aggression on the list had driven away women or caused them to be quiet, there was absolutely no statistical evidence that this effect was long lasting, or had even occurred - although it is possible that heightened awareness of this had reduced the effect.  In this case the aggression almost certainly stemmed from offlist personal matters - even one person can influence the shape of a list if they write enough or strongly enough.
It also seems to be that what is considered a flame differs between different people - we might note that it is usually other people who flame, not oneself.  A recurrent hallmark of political disputes on Cybermind has been people condemning the writings of others as flames while apparently unaware of the tone of their own writing.  As Herring goes on to argue, personal flames may be generally stated to be unacceptable, but non-personal flames may be acceptable to more males than females.  There is unfortunately no indication in her work as how she came to rate an email as a flame.  I found it impossible to make any kind of objective rating on this when I tried to do so.  So it becomes hard to check this proposition about women and flames, even though it is widely believed.
The Fourth story about Harassment, seems to be fairly well documented.  For example Campbell (1994) 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, whose message descriptions repeatedly included 'sex' and with whom he had had no prior contact.  Another man sent him his phone number, and so on.  Another less direct form of harassment is that people 'presenting' as female on MOOs are often challenged to prove their gender (La Pin and Bharadwaj).  It has been argued that this kind of harassment is one way that some males strive to maintain the net as a male domain.  However the situations in which harassment occurs are not clear, and it is not clear again whether it is changing, or not, with increasing numbers of women.  It is also not clear whether female harassment of males is common, as it probably would not be reported.
There are few well known cases of harassment on Cybermind for me to discuss.  Some seem to involve people who lurked on the list, and who perhaps mistook the appearance of familiarity and apparent intimacy with some female list members, who were living their lives in front of the list, as a mutual familiarity, and expected it would be returned.  One case I would not know about without the woman involved writing to me. A fairly major male on the list had been writing to her asking questions about local politics, or apparently asking for sympathy with his various problems.  The letters had become longer and had come to contain what she saw as sexual innuendo.  She commented that he might not know what he was doing but she was feeling pressured and harassed.  Dealing with this issue caused here a great deal of distress, especially when he followed her to other lists, but it did not seem possible for her to bring the matter to the attention of the list, and it seemed hard for her to tell him to leave her alone.  Eventually it seems that she did manage to communicate fairly directly with him, and thus ended the issue.  It was never really clear if the male had intended harassment, or whether he was just intending to be friendly in an inappropriate manner - the difference may not be clear in many cases, it is the effect which counts.  This is a problem, harassment can be largely unknown and unreported, and thus unknown to the researcher.
The most contentious case of harassment actually involved two women.  One of the women sent a relatively large number of explicit musings upon sex to the list (such as describing driving at speed while masturbating), and she was rumoured (in offlist contacts I had with other women) to have netsex with various men on the list, and perhaps even sexual contact - at the time this was not rare.  The eruption came when another women on the list accused her of harassing her boyfriend who was also on the list by writing sexually explicit emails to him.  This second woman threatened to destroy the career of the first woman by taking the events offline, and heated exchanges as to the truth of the matter occurred between the two women.  The moderator, plus some other people acting offlist, managed to get the dispute off the list and stopped. Publicly neither side received much support or condemnation. The first woman, wrote to me in response to a question: 
This was a devastating time.. I confided in several other list members but did not really receive support except from two people, one of whom was a lurker who I knew well and who sympathised. What I found was that people didn't want to be involved or appear to 'take sides'....  [People were] very shocked, I know - but I was amazed how little support I got. This demonstrated to me, that however 'real' we think the medium is, the fact is that people are not sure what to believe when the chips are down. In real life, if this had happened, I feel sure that people would have supported me.  

It did seem to be the case that people found it very hard to decide upon which side of the argument truth or probability lay. This was surprising, as in general people do not know the truth about others, but decide upon probabilities, or decide that it does not matter how someone may have behaved, it is the way people behave 'in public' that counts, etc.  It is possible the list was importing more 'mainstream' assumptions about sexual women as uncontrollable creatures into its behaviours, which fears were increased by projection or by uncertainty.  There may also have been a degree of fear, given the strength of the feelings and the threats involved, along the lines of 'what might any of the parties do if 'I' intervened publicly on either side, or even tried to make peace?'.  The dispute ended with the first woman leaving the list, but soon after subscribing under another address, and writing less explicit posts.
Another way in which harassment is reputed to occur online is through a large number of sex jokes or obscenities being used.  Thus in the first week of Cybermind's existence one female list member wrote (3 Jul.94): 
As for resorting to obscenities, I find it offputting. I tend to judge people who use obscenities quite negatively. I assume that they lack cogent language, they've run out of real arguments. Plus, I feel they show a lack of respect for the reader, especially for the many very young readers on the net, and, frequently, for women (whose minimal presence is often noted). 

Cynthia responded(3 Jul.94): on obscenities:
don't assume. i'm a girl and i use them all the time, and not because i am at a loss for words or can't manage an argument. they have other uses, that is, aside from indicating a lack of breeding or specific acculturation (they can be a sign of specific acculturation). 

Yet another female reader was even more direct. She wrote a one line reply: "Cogent language, yet? Gimme a fucking break".  This exchange lead to a flame war and the departure of the first woman.  
The problem here is to do with moral demand for authenticity - one of the few ways in which authenticity can be shown is by the breaking of rules, and by reference to the body and its inchoate underlying feeling nature.  Thus it is often the case that aggression is taken as more real, or as revealing more, than politeness.  In this schema, obscenities code real feeling.  Not everyone does this of course, but it is common, and people strive to find out the reality of others by reference to such underlying factors - of which the body's sex is one of the most important.  Authenticity is caught in a paradox whereby it is conventionally indicated by supposedly having no conventional indicators - thus supposed displays of truth can easily become unsettling.  Authenticity has only one meaning, and it is interesting how in a list filled with post-modernists who discuss the uncertainty of meaning, that one meaning alone is attributed to what people write to the list - especially if that meaning should be found offensive.
At the moment (may 2003) Cybermind seems too be going through an almost endless exchange of oneliners, many of which are sexual, the source of which seems to involve two women and two men.  I'm not sure if it drives away women, although it has come close to driving me away, as these messages drown any more sustained argument, and probably drive away newcomers who might have something else to say.  I would argue that this has come about in the strains which followed from the Bush Administration's decision to invade Iraq.  Most people on the list from outside the US were hostile to this decision and cynical about the events leading up to it, and many posts to the list expressed this opinion.  It was interesting to observe that even Americans who were critical of the Bush Administration seemed to take this criticism by foreigners as anti-american, and not only did a few flames eventuate, but a number of people left, or went no-mail, specifically blaming anti-americanism for their departure.  Nationality is not something which disappears online.  Perhaps as a result critical posts seemed to lessen.  The more or less content free one liners seemed to develop to fill in the gap.  One of the women most involved in the one liner exchange had specifically stated that she did not want to think about the war.  I'm not really sure if these sexual posts arose as an attempt to silence dissent against US policy, or whether (more probably) they were relatively easy to perform, of common reference, and gave a sense of the existence of the continuing group (to some) in a time of stress. In which case the posts might be conceivably seen as fulfilling the female role of cementing solidarity between people.

Previous research
I briefly want to take up some research on gender differences online and compare these results to what I found.  The most well known of researchers on this issue is Susan Herring. 
In her study of the discussion lists LINGUIST and Megabyte University, Herring found that women participated "at a rate that is significantly lower than that corresponding to their numerical representation". "Women constitute 36% of LINGUIST and 42% of MBU subscribers".  Yet in a discussion on sexism, women constituted only 30% of posters. In more neutral theoretical discussions they made up only 16% of posters.  Herring also states that "the messages contributed by women are shorter... a very long message invariably indicates that the sender is male", and that "messages posted by women consistently received fewer average responses than those posted by men.... [T]opics initiated by women are less often taken up as topics of discussion by the group as a whole" (Herring 1996b: 480).
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 posting more than were the men.  This indicates that most women might have been quiet while some where being very active, but she does not give us enough information to be sure, or to be able to say how many people of either gender were very active - in general it seems that a small number of posters on any list write most of the messages.  Herring does write 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, or argumentative, female presence.
Herring further claims that in order of decreasing magnitude: men discussed issues, provided information, made queries and wrote about personal things. Women talked about personal things, made queries, then discussed issues, and least of all provided information.  It is not stated how she determines if something is personal or not - on one occasion she says "writing about linguists and not linguistics".
Herring does not investigate, except briefly, the actual interaction of male and female subjects, each utterance seems to be taken in isolation, so there is no investigation of overall trends or variation, or even of the ways in which people interact to co-produce the ambience of the list, or in which they recognise and reinforce gender.  Proper engagement with these kind of local level issues requires intensive fieldwork rather than brief visits or abstract samples.  Fieldwork better enables the researcher to get to know individuals, and place them amongst the local and wider social dynamics they are intertwined within.  Herring had to ignore large amounts of the data she gathered, because of her ignorance of the gender identification of particular people in the group - which may well have influenced her results, especially those about use of male and female language styles.  As a result her sample sizes are fairly small - although not as small as those of some other researchers - Ferris, for example, uses a sample of 25 posts to make her assertions about men and women online.  Only recently (2000) has Herring suggested that different modes of Internet communication might affect these kinds of results, as might the topic, or the proportion of men and women using the group.  People appear to adapt their behaviours towards the gender style of the predominant gender, or of the most prolific group.  Volume of posts is more important than the size of any subgroup in a list.  Her results have not always been replicated by researchers of other groups (cf Saviki et al 1996, 1999, Hatt 1998, Vaughn Trias 1999), and were not the case in statistical analyses of Cybermind.
With my analyses of posts to Cybermind, I was not able to evaluate in any satisfactory way what Herring considers to be male or female features of language, levels of aggression and so on, and she gives us no example of how she scored these things. Therefore I can only comment on fairly straightforward issues.
First of all to give some idea of the gender of people during the period of research.  I took two surveys in may 1996 and November 1996.  When things have settled down a little on the List I hope to do some more up to date surveys to see how things have changed. Looking first at list population by gender.
Table 1:
		Responses to Survey 1	'Genderable' population of List at that time	Responses to Survey 2	Genderable population of list at that time	
	Female	26%	27%	36%	26%	
	Male 	74%	73%	64%	74%	

Although the gender ratios of response to the survey changed by what appears to be a significant amount, the ratio of identifiable males to females on list was fairly constant, and for the time period fairly high. For comparison, Burstein & Kline, quote a Georgia Institute of Technology report from July 1995, which claimed that only 15% of Internet users were female (1995: 102).  It is of some interest that average age of women who responded to the first survey was greater than the average age for the list - suggesting at that time that males on the list were much younger. By the second survey the average and median age for both sexes was the same.
	I also counted emails made during March, June, September and December of 1995, in order to try and see the proportion of women posting to the list.
Table 2: Presence of Women
month	No. of women posting	% of active pop that is female	No. of posts made by women	% of total posts made by women	% of women in the 20% most prolific posters	No. of posts made by prolific women	% of posts made by the 20% most prolific female posters 	No of women making 5 or less posts	% of those making 5 or less posts who are women	
Mar	28	23%	269	21%	25%	194	21%	17	23%	
Jun	25	20%	463	23%	20%	303	22%	11	17%	
Sept	25	27%	507	30%	27%	294	26%	08	16%	
Dec	29	26%	342	28%	27%	205	26%	16	26%	

As can be seen from this table women, at this time in the list's history, seem to have been active on the list roughly in proportion to their numbers, and this does not seem to be the result of just a few women skewing the figures, as women do not seem to be less active than we might expect.
In order to investigate a possible correlation between gender and response rates (such questions as whether males responded primarily to other males, whether female posters were ignored and so on), I considered 900 consecutive posts from March 1995.  Of these 900 posts it was possible to classify 798 of them as ether male responses to males, male responses to females, female responses to males, female responses to females, males starting a thread, or females starting a thread. The remaining posts were either by people of unclear gender; posts in which it was not obvious to whom the poster was replying; and posts addressed generally to the list but not initiating a new thread.  
	This gave a final sample of 798 posts, of which 598 (or 75%) were made by males and 200 (or 25%) were made by females.  Distribution of responses were as follows:
Table 3: Response Rates and Gender
	M to M	M to F	F to M	F to F	M start	F start	
number	386	126	123	48	86	29	
percent	48%	16%	15%	6%	11%	4%	

Clearly 63% of these posts were responses to males, and 22% were responses to females Remember the population is about ¾ male and ¼ female.
	If we take the percentage of these responses as a fraction of all posts by that gender - for example, the percentage of all female posts to males as a fraction of all female posts and tabulate them, then: 
Table 4:
	M to M	M to F	F to M	F to F	M Start	F Start	
	65%	21%	61%	24%	14%	15%	

There appears to be little significant difference between the response rates of males and females to each other, although males responded slightly less to females than females did, and females responded slightly less to males than males did. Both genders tried to initiate threads equally.
	Comparing the number of posts by a gender and the number of responses to people of that gender, then 85% of male posts were responded to and 87% of female posts were responded to.
	In order to investigate whether the posts sent in by males were longer than those sent in by females I looked at one week between the 11th and 18th of April 1995.  After allocating posts by gender, I counted the original lines of text, ignoring text which had been quoted.  I also ignored a few posts which were primarily lists of Internet sites, or computer programs.  All together the count involved 264 posts, and some 3,549 lines of text.  There were 200 posts from identified males, and 64 posts from identified females.  Obviously just over 24% of posts came from women, which is slightly less than normal.  The males wrote 2,686 lines of text, for an average of 13.43 lines of text per post, and the females wrote 863 lines of text for an average of 13.48 lines of text per post.  Though further counting throughout the year, and looking at different circumstances, might turn up a different result, this does suggest that average length of posts is reasonably similar between genders on this list.
	So the question arise why the difference in results to those of Herring?  This has to be the subject of further, and comparative, investigation.  A possible hypotheses is that Cybermind has been a mailing list with a large amount of personal contact and off topic conversation, and this off-topicness can create a sense of community and bonding by expanding the personal.  However this might make it harder for people to protest against treatment by some other list members due to the possible damage to the list - as when my friend did not publicly complain about her harassment.  Also the list started off in this manner. In its first week of operation half of the 12 most prolific posters were women, and this is not really contradicted by saying that it is not clear to me that these were not the same women who were involved in the first flame war.  Cybermind, at one time, also had a relatively large and visible lesbian population, which is not the case nowadays, and I would not be so sure that the list has retained its balance of population sizes and postings.
	I also tried to ask list members whether they thought that Herring's remarks on male and female communication were accurate, as it is important also not just to check whether these things are the case but whether people think they are the case.  Besides these might be subjective issues in the first place.  Most respondents did not think that lengthy emails tended to originate with males - the sole respondent who thought they did was an offlist female respondent who drew my attention to the Herring article, and thus might have expectations stemming from that article. Neither did people think that women had more tendency to make more frequent short posts than men. 
There was some disagreement as to whether more competitive exchanges came from males and more nurturing or binding exchanges came from females. Rose for example wrote "Yeah - I think so". Alan wrote "Yes". X thought it was probably true in general but perhaps not so much on Cybermind as elsewhere. Morrigan denied this difference of response while thinking it was more complex: "No, there is such a degree of cross over anyhow, like how does age and class and race and country of origin effect the personality of the poster". Caitlin, though expressing reservations and agreeing with the need to do a close count, wrote: 
not in my experience.  I find that women posting on lists can be just as competitive and confrontational as men and men can be just as nurturant and binding as women.  I do think that many people have this impression, but I'm not sure it's 'true'. 

So it would seem that it at lest some members of the list did not find it to be the case, and only one person thought it a definite result.
As suggested earlier, one of the most marked gender divisions in the Western English Speaking World seems to be that women are associated with patterns of intimacy - for example by maintaining the exchange of gifts between family members - and I wondered if, given that offlist patterns of communication tend to be dyadic and private, whether they would approximate the conventions for intimacy more than onlist, and gender be more important in that field.  This is a fairly difficult area to investigate - the perennial problem is that offlist behaviour is largely invisible.  People often say that online research could proceed invisibly without people knowing and without the researcher disrupting the participants, but in reality the hiddeness is often more of a problem than the openness is a benefit.
	Anecdotal evidence does suggest that most continuing offlist exchanges involve at least one woman, and that intimate exchanges will also tend to involve a woman.  It appeared hard for women to answer the questions about this, many pointing out that any interaction involving them had to involve at least one woman.  As the question did not have to refer solely to a person's own exchanges, but to what they knew about others, this difficulty implies a general lack of knowledge of the behaviour of others offlist.  Alan responded: "most of my correspondence off-list is with women, with 'bursts' or 'cycles' of correspondence with men. With men, it seems to revolve around specific issues". This was also the case for myself, with the possible exception of correspondence with Alan himself. A few offlist correspondences with males on this subject also suggest this might be the case in general.
Let us listen to what some of the women who replied wrote, to give some idea of the complexities of these issues.  Rose considered that "women are perhaps _more_ 'mutually supportive' off-list than on?  ('They aren't listening - now we can talk!')". While she considered that most praise about her posts came from males, she thought this was probably because she was female. Morrigan, suggests that the gender of the audience might be more important than the gender of the writer, writing:  
I've found, personally, that women become more open off list more easily. Women seem to make themselves more vulnerable to me a lot quicker than men do, but maybe that's because I am another woman, ie it has nothing to do with the originator but with the audience.  Some men consistently appear to maintain an 'arms length' kind of tone. Sometimes I wonder whether this is because of the innate sexual tension that is there between women and men when there is something of a creative nature.

Caitlin wrote: 
Men are more likely to write me to tell me they enjoyed something I wrote. I haven't noticed any huge difference in the ways that people write me based on their gender [...] Usually, when I strike a chord, the mail I get backchannel is filled w/personal revelation and I haven't noticed any difference there.  I haven't noticed men being somehow more careful w/me due to issues of sexual tension, either. Certainly that sort of tension exists, but I'll note that women are as likely to flirt w/me in email (and I w/them) as men are.

In research done by Bennett (####) exploring the effect of email communication on the ability of WESW men to express their less valued emotions in email, she was surprised at the openness her project generated, but considered, as did her participants, that her being female was important to producing this effect.  So it is possible the intimacy value of 'being a woman' can be exaggerated online - this may be one of the things that contribute to harassment - men seeking inappropriate intimacy from 'ideal women' - but it may mean that males, from these cultures, have a tendency to become less intimate with each other online.
In response to the question: "Do women see off-list exchanges as independent from the list?, or is there a tendency to perceive these exchanges as maintaining the network of the list?, or the networks of particular groups off list?" 
Rose wrote "No. No. No.", while  X wrote: 
I think this is not an 'either/ or' answer rather it is an 'and'. That is to say that yes I think of off list exchanges as independent from the list in the same sense as I think of socialising with someone I work with as separate to the group mileau. However while there is a separation, there is not a divison (if you can follow) the list, or group is still there. It informs conversation and likewise the off-line, or out of group contact, can be brought back and shared with others, if appropriate. 

Morrigan replied: 
I see off-list exchanges as both independent and dependent.  All mutual exchange is development and that development is taken back onto the list. The other day [her partner] made a friendship band out of silk embroidery threads for me. It's not a complicated process, but it is intricate and time consuming, ordering the threads and tying the knots to produce something that is so totally different from each individual thread. For me the List and back channel is like that.

She added that: 
more men write to me than women, but (in the main) the women wish to engage in a more prolonged exchange, offer more information about themselves/feelings, etc.  It's back to that thing about the tension between the sexes, maybe the men don't want to be pushy in any way, intrusive.
 
And Caitlin adds: 
We're having this conversation because of something you or me said on the list, but, depending upon the direction the conversation takes and the relationship that may develop from said conversation, the exchange may become completely unrelated to this list and the community.  Or maybe not.
 
Rose also thought that women would probably be more comfortable in offlist exchanges but that "ain't me personal pat'urn, right?  I'll natter wherever I ain't bin turned off!".  Others expressed more ambivalence.  X wrote "can only answer for me. yes. and it has exactly to do with the exchange thing. the potential for 'not being met' if/when one posts. For me posting to the list is always risky". Morrigan wrote: 
Yes, I feel very stupid most of the time, intellectually challenged.  I don't think this has to do with the nature of this particular List, rather the nature of society.  Women like me (no degree, no career, three kids, no job) are pretty much dispossessed and it's hard to contribute from that base.  Off list is different because there's more intimacy.

Caitlin added that it wasn't the case for her:  
but then shyness in either the virtual or physical world really isn't a problem for me.  I'll talk to just about anybody, just about anywhere.  I do know that I am more self-confident in this way than most of the people I know. 

These exchanges also show some of the variations involved in people's construction of list 'culture' (at least around gender) and, perhaps, the facility with which this group constructs culture around various themes and categories.  Despite these variations there is clearly enough commonality for people to appear to understand each other. In summary; people seem to feel that gender is important, though more important in constituting offlist life than in influencing onlist life - with the exception that at least two women felt somewhat nervous about making public communications, feeling the risk that their expressions might be rejected or ignored. People with a particular lack of confidence in exchange might not reply to such questions at all.  Another series of exchanges on Cybermind, also covered the common concept that WESW women tend to be less outspoken in academic settings, and that, as a result, the list's mode of discussion might sometimes be excluding.  
However at the same time it appears the women responding seem dubious about a hard distinction between onlist and offlist life.  Perhaps this is because of an implicit suggestion that onlist life is real list life, when it appears that, at least on occasions, offlist life is more vital than onlist life, or cannot easily be separated out, or transforms onlist life for them. There is a "separation but not a division".

	One thing that seems clear is that gender is important for online life - although in discussion of the effects of gender on online life on Cybermind, it was relatively common for males to deny its importance, and one male in particular continually disrupted a discussion on the issue, by insisting that gender should not be important as no one knew what gender you were.  Online it is hard to categorise people, and categorisation of people is one of the ways in which people decide what kind of messages people are emitting and whether they are likely to have much in common - especially when people are seeking some level of intimacy, or bonding, because of the apparent stresses of the offline lives.  So we can get some ideas of the importance of particular categories, in different situations, by how often they are asked for.  In general people tend to agree that the most popular category questions online have to do with gender, age and location. The question of "what do you do?" which locates class and prosperity and probable education is less common (Ten Have).  Identification by politics also seems to be something that happens fairly quickly and can produce fault lines of interpretation, but it is rarely sought for.
	The question also arises as to whether the Internet is likely to transform gender behaviour or not.  I've suggested that to some extent it might reinforce certain types of categories as people 'play' to them to produce good examples or go looking for their perfect man or woman.  At the same time knowledge that people make these kind of exaggerations also produces fear and uncertainty - people fear that the other person may be lying, or that they may be 'falling for a fantasy'.  
One perhaps positive thing that has been mentioned to me, is that because people only appear present online when they type, that it is more common for males on MOOs to engage in conversation with women, or to try and gain their opinions, than it is offline where the presence of a listener is so much more marked.  
	Whether this kind of effect is significant or not, is also difficult to research as it requires access to both people's on and offline lives.

The Project
The Cybermind Gender Project has several key aims:
1) To explore the effects of, and generation of, gender in online computer based interactions, and upon uses of the Internet in general.
2) To discover what online factors influence these effects. Suspected factors include, the type of online group (whether for example, mailing list, MOO, newsgroup, chat or IRC channel), the structures of communication, the types of topic invoked, language use, and the differing proportions of visible gendered people in the group.
3) To explore the ways gender is presented in personal web pages, and in the use of the World Wide Web.
4) To discover the offline factors which influence these effects, such as wider social contexts, organisational roles, roles of technology and technological proficiency, the history of technology, economic instability, social position and changing gender roles. 
	The project intends to conceptualise both the small and large scale picture of gender on the Internet. It aims to uncover the effects of real or imagined gender, not only on online interaction, but also on usage patterns of the net.
	Because of the long term field work the project will cover issues of history and change, and it will engage in a degree of comparative work.
Members of the list have already been invited to participate in the project and to contribute descriptions and analyses of their experience - some of these contributions may well be the length of formal papers. The active participation of people with various gender identifications will stop the project from making a person of one gender (myself) being only the source of knowledge of others, and thus lead to a greater degree of accuracy in the analysis of gendered experience.  The research is an attempt at a multivoiced ethnography, and is thus geared to have a degree of self reflexivity - those being researched are expected to comment upon the research and its methods and add to its richness. It is hoped that this multivoiced process will expose issues of how gender affects the research itself, and will lead the project to explore its own preconceptions.  Participants will also supply techniques and knowledges outside of my field of experience (such as linguistics) thus adding further depth to the study.  Although this collaboration of group members with the analyst is not foreign to anthropology (although its acknowledgment and exploration is relatively uncommon), it is rare in studies of the Internet - despite the keenness with which Internet users analyse their behaviour and that of others.
Web usage of list members, as already implied, will be pursued not only through the normal processes of discussion and survey, but also through asking people to contribute their favourite websites to the list, or to the group web pages. The information gained can then be analysed by the genders of the respondents. It may be discovered that one gender is more prone to share such discoveries in public than another, which is possibly significant in itself. However, offlist contacts will enable me to restore a balance if this happens.
I hope this brief presentation has not only introduced the project, but also served to make some of the questions and difficulties clearer.