Part E: Project Description 

E1: PROJECT TITLE
Understanding Online Gender: Structures and Use of Computer Mediated Communication and its Social Environments.

E2: PROJECT DESCRIPTION AND BACKGROUND:
This project has several key aims:
1) To explore the effects of, and generation of, gender in online interactions, and on uses of the Internet in general.
2) To discover what online factors influence these effects. Suspected factors might 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 what offline factors 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 Understanding Online Gender Project has grown out of my Ph.D research into the social life of the Internet mailing list, Cybermind, a list which was set up to discuss the sociology and psychology of Cyberspace, but which has an extremely large amount of 'off-topic' social behaviour. While researching this list it became apparent that, despite an ideology which almost demanded that gender be irrelevant to online interaction, gender was in fact one of the prime demarcators of online identity and a prime factor in determining people's responses to others, both conscious and unconscious. Gender clearly affected people in other types of online environments as well, as became apparent as I further investigated people's interactions with each other off the list. This research suggested that the effects of gender are not the same in different types of online environment (such as mailing list, MOO or newsgroup), and they do not always replicate the effects expected by the people themselves - for example, women are not necessarily more co-operative or less prone to issue abuse (see also Witmar 1996). 
	Apart from ethnographic description, the main aims of my previous research were to explore the ways in which the organisation of communication affected potential, and probable, individual and group behaviour. A main feature which was identified, was the effects of what I called 'asence' (or the uncertainty regarding presence or absence of self and others), on online life, particularly as it affected gender behaviour, flaming and the construction of community. This research also suggested that when checks of 'fact' were difficult or misplaced, then marked symbolic features, such as gender or even politics, can actually become more important in resolving asence and communicative ambiguity in general.  This helps explain the well known magnification effects of online communication which appear for example in 'flame', or 'online romance'.
There has been a large and increasing amount of work on Gender online, most of which is unsatisfactory because it has been conducted over short lengths of time. This means that large amounts of the data have had to be ignored because of the researchers ignorance of the general gender identification of people in the group. Much of this work, as for example that of Susan Herring (1993, 1996, 1999), has been relatively abstract focusing on evaluations of language and topic use, and classifying it as 'female' or 'male', and then deciding which gender dominates the group. 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. Only recently (2000) has she 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). The results she has found have not always been replicated by researchers of other groups (Saviki et al 1996, 1999, Hatt 1998, Vaughn Trias 1999), and were not found to be the case in my statistical analyses of Cybermind. Her work is however greatly important in showing that in many groups the dominance of males, and 'male styles', can diminish the participation of women, and her later suggestions about types of group and population balance deserve closer investigation.
Much of the work on online gender has also focused on 'cross gender impersonation'. While this phenomenon seems to have been exaggerated, it is significant that this has become such an apparently worrying issue. It is more important to ask why it arouses such consternation, and to explore why it is that impersonation of males by females is more upsetting than vice versa; to ask whether it reinforces gender stereotypes rather than challenges them; and to ask under what conditions it occurs. On Mailing Lists, it seems that such cross gender impersonation is relatively rare, and often 'accidental' in the sense that people may attribute to others a gender which they have not claimed, usually through lack of familiarity with that person. This then evokes the issue of the, often unconscious, ways in which people assign gender to others, and how these ways of assigning gender affect communication. One of the initial results of my research suggests that women are far more prone to report gender as important to their online experience, and far less prone to claim it can be abandoned than males. This is despite evidence that people of both genders find that discovering someone they thought was female was 'in fact' male can be distressing. It could be hypothesised that because male gender still constitutes the default gender, men are more prone to seeing their behaviour as ungendered, and thus their idea of abandoning gender requires little loss, while as for women abandoning gender may seem to be a requirement to 'become male', and suppress vital aspects of their identity.
Other research has suggested that there may well be generational effects on online gender (Kaplan & Farell 1994, Jenkins 1998). For example, it has been suggested that younger women may be better able to deal with computers and the Internet than older women. Again, initial research on Cybermind, has shown that things are not quite as simple as this, as its primary female population in the mid 1990s would have been well over their thirties. However, population growth has been in younger women. Again previous research ignores the investigation of generational effects in men, or many of the questions about the effects of offline life on gender. The time span of the data collection which began in late 1994 should allow historical and generational change to be investigated in a way which has previously not been possible.
Research into gendered presentation of people's identity on Web pages has only just begun, but the work carried out by Arnold & Miller (1999, 2001, Miller & Arnold 2000a, 2000b, 2001a, 2001b), and Kibby (1997) shows quite complex results. However this research work again, suffers form being concerned with a quite limited set of sites. Kibby seems to focus primarily on sites in which women concentrate upon their sexualised identity and upon their bodies. Arnold & Miller focus on the web sites of academics and report that there appears to be marked differences between the presentation of selves between male and female academics. They remark that "men's pages were shorter.. there was more variety and self-reference in women's pages… 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". Women academics also tended to be ambivalent about using photographs on their web sites, but tended to say that they liked finding photographs on other women's websites, and most of the respondents volunteered that, on reflection, they were not neutral in their approach to gender in their use of the web, and that their use patterns appeared different to that of their male colleagues. It would be profitable to pursue such investigations outside of academia, and to see how an online group makes use of websites,  recommends websites and portrays themselves on websites. Although, this kind of research would be difficult, one of the advantages of using a self reflexive group like Cybermind, is that such research falls within the parameters of the group's existence, and it would easily be possible to gain access to members' websites (by asking for them, so that they can be included on the group's home page), and through simple observation of sig files, or through people's use of their own websites to present events and writings of interest to the group. Following group members' web activity would be far less accurate as research would have to rely upon surveys and interviews, but this is the case with all live exploration in this kind of field, and at least members of the list frequently forward the addresses of sites they consider to be interesting, even if they are of dubious relevance to the group's official topic.
Finally, it appears that there has been very little research, other than that into cross gender impersonation, which focuses on changes that use of the Internet may produce in men, either in relation to women, or in relation to other men. Bennett's work (1998) suggests that western men may be able to become more emotionally expressive and open to women than has been the case in their offline lives. But the limited sample employed as well as the dyadic interview structure, do not allow us to generalise, and certainly do not allow us to predict what might happen between men online. Again, participation in various groups, observation of interactions between the genders, and interviews with a wider ranging collection of people will allow such points to be investigated further.

E3 SIGNIFICANCE AND INNOVATION
	This research explores a feature of undoubted significance for online life. If such gender factors are not acknowledged but are in fact influential, then, particularly given the history of the net and its numerical preponderance of males, gender will almost certainly affect the ease with which women can approach the online world and act within it. Any research which explores how both sexes are affected by conceptions and conventions about gender, would be of use to anyone who wished to facilitate the adoption of productive Internet usage by women. Furthermore if the effects of gender are either more pronounced than many online users claim, or different from what might be expected, then attempts to deal with these issues will be misguided at best and prone to produce unintended effects.
	As indicated in the previous section, past research on online uses of gender has been fairly piecemeal, and has tended to consider the genders separately, or as statistics, rather than to consider people in interaction. Previous research has also tended to be anecdotal or a-temporal - the latter effect occurring because so little research has focused on any group for any length of time. The shortage of time spent on analysing any group has also meant that, in general, large numbers of messages have had to be discarded without featuring in the analysis, because the gender of the sender was unknown to the researchers - such ignorance, can in my experience, be found to diminish with familiarity with the group. Furthermore, though more controlled laboratory type research might avoid this ignorance and is obviously of benefit, it is equally obviously not going to portray behaviour 'in the wild' outside the laboratory. Participant observation is less likely to fall into category generalisations (for example, to assume that all members of one gender are similar), and it is more able to deal with the constant ambiguities of online behaviour, than either laboratory or purely statistical research. The Proposed research is oriented not only by in depth field research and statistical analysis, but also by the observation of history and change over time within a particular group of Internet users. Furthermore by attempting to involve a large cross spectrum of Internet users it has less chance of the bias resulting from a single observer. This type of research will better help us to understand what kinds of factors influence the salience of gender and its fluctuations.
	The project endeavours 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 for the net. The proposed programme develops and builds upon existing research, making use of one of the few large scale and historical investigations of online life, extending the methodology employed in that research and the insights gained from that work. Research which combines ethnographic sensitivity, wide theoretical proficiency and the careful use of statistical methods, is easily at the forefront of this relatively new research area.

E4 APPROACH
	As the approach to be taken depends upon the advantages of the group for this kind of research, these advantages will be described first. Secondly I will show how the methodology links to the aims. Thirdly I will give a time line for the progress of the project.
Part 1: Advantages of the Mailing List Cybermind
1) My previous research there, and my knowledge of the history of the list.  I have a large body of existing contacts and 'informants'. The availability of my Thesis to list members has actually increased the levels of people's trust and willingness to participate. Members of the list have already been informed of the project, many have expressed interest in it, and the research will not be disruptive of the list.
2) The variety and active participation of members. Cybermind has members from many different countries; the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, the Middle East and Europe.  Members occupy a relatively large number of different social positions, and do not object to such research being carried out, and are liable to discuss these kinds of topic as well as to retell their experiences. The list is also consistently high volume and provides much data and discussion.
3) There are large quantities of archival material from this group, both collected personally and held on the Web. In all, at least five years worth of records of the actual public face of the list exist in easily accessible forms. This allows the return to a large part of the actual social processes of the list, to investigate past history, to provide texts for list members to discuss, to measure social change, and to test hypotheses. Such detailed records are usually not available for ethnographic analysis. Essentially an ongoing data-base already exists for the list.
Part 2 Methodology and Aims
1) The methodology will involve participant fieldwork primarily focusing on members of the list Cybermind. The presence of the historical databases means that collection of data does not depend upon my understanding of an event at the time. It is always possible to revisit events in the light of further information or understanding.
2) My long standing connection with the list and its members means that collecting of offlist mail and taking of interviews does not constitute a problem. Interviews are conducted not only in the normal course of communication and daily life, such as discussing events and other people with list members and in a variety of situations (such as via email, via MOO, via IRC and via phone), but formally, with structured questions and specific aims. Formal surveys have always been well responded to, and other people have also made formal surveys of the group, which not only naturalises the survey form, but means that the questions asked do not simply reflect my interests, but can lead to unexpected information.
3) This largely 'natural' involvement with the group means that it is easy for the observer to become taken for granted. It is also easy for the participant observer to observe without directly participating so that they only minimally affect what is going on. It is even, possible, thanks to the records, to investigate events I was not actually there for. Futhermore this 'naturalism' means that it is easy to follow, and participate with, list members through their other usage of Internet forums and to be present without causing disruption, or without people feeling they are constantly under scrutiny, or without interfering with their net usage.
4) 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 of 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. As such 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 expose its own preconceptions. It should also be stated that explicit issues around gender are often spontaneously raised on the list, which provides another path into research.
5) While participant observation is the best way developed of gaining access to social life at the micro level, in which most day to day gender interactions and constructions occur, this does not discount the need for more 'objective' measures of the kind which can be gained from use of statistical techniques. Texts, being fixed artefacts, and constituting the basis of online social life, can easily be analysed for volume, length, format, presence of certain kinds of words and so on. Such features can be checked by other researchers, and can also be analysed with respect to gender (when the researcher has had enough time with the group to determine people's genders). Various surveys and statistical analyses of list mail have already been carried out for the original thesis, and further such statistical analyses will be carried out during this project, so that the factors of change and continuity can be analysed. 
6) Surveys and ordinary discussion with list members allow the gathering of people's biographical and social data, so that it is then possible to make generalisations about the offline social phenomena that affect people. List members also use the list to extend their offline social lives, and to discuss those issues which concern them, so again the issue of offline effects on online behaviour comes up spontaneously in the group, making these issues relatively easy to gain information upon.
7) A web site has already been set up for the project, so that participants can comment upon writings of others who are participating, and it is expected that people will discuss the issues involved on the list, as well as display them. The history of the list shows that such discussion is something that will occur, which also means that list members would not consider the research disruptive. The web site also includes already collected examples of discussion on gender, and gendered interaction from Cybermind. 
8) This part of the project has the explicit target of producing a book about the research and the list with the aim of encouraging people to participate in the ethnography and produce texts on their experience.
9) Web usage of list members, as already implied, will be pursued not only through the normal processes of discussion and survey, but through asking people to contribute their favourite websites to the list, or for the group web pages. The information gained can then be analysed by the genders of the respondents. It may also 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.
Part 3: Timeline
YEAR	ACTIVITIES	
2003	a) Continue with data collection and participation on list.
       i) aim to increase my range of contacts on the list
       ii) keep establishing my presence as researcher and participant on the list.
b) Work towards first draft of the gender project book.
       i) complete my initial essays, with the exception of the offline gender theory section.
       ii) encourage other participants to finish promised contributions.
c) Increase my knowledge of gender theory in the offline world, through reading and participation in seminars. Fields to be covered include anthropology, linguistics, social psychology, feminist and queer theory.
d) Publish initial findings in Journals and on the web.	
2004	a) Continue with data collection and participation in list.
b) Write literature review on offline gender theory for introduction to book. Modify my other parts of the introduction in light of further understanding.
c) Present the first draft of the book for comments from list members, and for the addition of complexities, and for possibility of increasing the number of voices. 
d) Add final comments to the book, and allow transparent update of essays to reflect comments of list members and the further information collected.	
2005	a) Using data gathered in previous years begin the writing of the report on members usage of the World Wide Web.
b) Submission of findings to the List, with request for comments and feedback.
c) Publication of final report in journals.	

E5 NATIONAL BENEFIT
	As already indicated this research will be useful to the understanding of how both genders participate on the Internet. It will be of use to policy makers in deciding what kinds of Internet policies need to be pursued in order to get a productive discourse between genders, or to encourage women to feel at ease in online communication. It may become possible to specify the kinds of conditions that lead to productive discourse and to lessen the degrees of harassment or patronisation which people can experience. This should, in itself lead to increased productivity in any kind of environment, or work place, which depends upon computers for a major part of its communicative structure. As it is widely agreed that Information Technology is at the heart of future economic activity, and is a prime way in which markets judge the economic potential and well being of any country, then anything which increases the online presence of Australia or Australians is not only of benefit to the country's economic productivity, but to overseas perceptions of that productivity.

E6 COMMUNICATION OF RESULTS
	As already indicated, the research is already being communicated via the Web, and there is a tentative agreement with the editor of a series of books on Gender in the Modern World, to publish a book with a European publisher. It is also expected that research would be published in journals as it progresses, and papers presented at conferences to either business or academic groups. Papers, covering the initial work on the project are likely to be presented at departmental seminars, at Sydney University, the University of Newcastle, and at UTS, later in this current year (2002).

E7 DESCRIPTION OF PERSONNEL
	The only person formally involved with the project at a salaried level would be myself. As indicated, members of the list Cybermind not only engage in this kind of speculation continuously, but provide examples of gendered behaviour online in their everyday interaction. It is well understood that I am researching the list, and the URL for the Understanding Online Gender Project and a brief statement of its aims are posted with some frequency. However, some members of the list have indicated that they would more willingly and actively participate in the project if they could be reimbursed for their time and activity, and so I would like to make some provision for such expenses, which I would estimate to be of minor extent. Previous research projects on this list have functioned quite adequately without any payments being made, however as I would like to make this project as 'multi-voiced' as possible, this inability to provide financial incentive and compensation may no longer produce optimal results.

E8 REFERENCES

Arnold, Jill & Miller, Hugh 
(1999) "Gender and web pages", paper presented at the CAL99 Virtuality in Education Conference, The Institute of Education, London. 
http://www.ntu.ac.uk/soc/psych/miller/cal99.htm 
(2001) "Academic masters, mistresses and apprentices: gender and power in the real world of the web", Mots Pluriels, No 19. 
http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP1901jahm.html
Bennett, Caroline M 
(1998) "Men Online: Discussing Lived Experiences on the Internet", unpublished Honours thesis,, Department of Social Sciences, James Cook University. 
http://www.hotkey.net.au/%7Ecarolineb/
Hatt, Daniel F 
(1998) "Male/Female Language Use in Computer Dyadic Interactions", unpublished MA thesis, Lauretian University, Ontario. 
http://www.fortunecity.com/boozers/princessdi/302/Lang.html
Herring, Susan
	(1993) "Gender and Democracy in Computer Mediated Communication", EJC/REC Vol.3, No.2 
http://dc.smu.edu/dc/classroom/Gender.txt
	(1996) "Two Variants of an Electronic Message Schema", in Herring (ed) Computer Mediated Communication: Linguistic, Social and Cross-Cultural Perspectives, John Benjamins, Amsterdam.
	(1999) "The Rhetorical Dynamics of Gender Harassment Online", The Information Society, Vol.15, pp.151-167. 
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/TIS/articles/herring15(3).pdf
(2000)"Gender Differences in CMC: Findings and Implications", CPSR Newsletter, Vol.18, No.1 
http://www.cpsr.org/publications/newsletters/issues/2000/Winter2000/herring.html
Kaplan, Nancy & Farrell 
(1994) "Weavers of Webs: a Portrait of Young Women on the Net", Arachnet Journal of Virtual Culture Vol.2, No.3. 
http://www.monash.edu.au/journals/ejvc/kaplan.v2n3
Kendall, Lori 
(1998) "Meaning and Identity in 'cyberspace': The Performance of Gender, Class and Race Online", Symbolic Interaction, Vol.21, No.2, pp.129-53. 
Kibby, Marj 
	(1997) "'BABES ON THE WEB': Sex, Identity and the Home Page", Media International Australia, No.84, May, pp.39-45. 
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/department/so/babes.htm
Kibby, M. & Costello, B. 
1999) "Displaying the Phallus: Masculinity and the Performance of Sexuality on the Internet", Men and Masculinities, Vol.1, No.4, pp352-364. 
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/department/so/maledisp.htm
Jenkins, Summer 
(1998) Gender Differences in the Use of the Internet as a Means of Personal Communication, Unpublished MA dissertation, University of London. 
http://www.agari.org/summer/
Miller, H. & Arnold, J. 
(2000a) "Gender and Web Home Pages", Computers and Education, Vol.34, pp335-339. 
(2000b) "Same Old Gender Plot? Women Academics' Identities on the Web". Paper presented at the Cultural Diversities in/and Cyberspace Conference, University of Maryland. 
http://ess.ntu.ac.uk/miller/cyberpsych/gendplot.htm 
(2001a) "Breaking Away from Grounded Identity? Women Academics on the Web". Cyberpsychology and Behaviour, vol.4, no.1, pp95-108. 
(2001b) "Self in Web Home Pages: Gender, Identity and Power in Cyberspace". In G. Riva & C. Galimberti (eds) Cyberpsychology: Mind, Cognition and Society in the Internet Age, IOS Press, Amseterdam.
Savicki, V. Kelley, M & Oesterreich,E. 
(1999) "Judgments of Gender in Computer-Mediated Communication", Computers in Human Behavior, Vol.15, pp.185-194. 
Savicki, V., Lingenfalter, D. & Kelley, M. 
(1996) "Gender Language Style and Group Composition in Internet Discussion Groups", Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Vol.2, No.3. 
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol2/issue3/savicki.html
Vaughn Trías, Jennifer 
(1999) "Democracy or Difference?: Gender Differences in the Amount of Discourse on an Internet Relay Chat Channel", paper presented at the 1999 Popular Culture Association, Annual Meeting.
http://nimbus.temple.edu/~jvaughn/papers/pca99.html
Witmer, Diane F. 
(1996) "On-Line Smiles: Does Gender Make a Difference in the Use of Graphic Accents?", Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Vol.2, No.4
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol2/issue4/witmer1.html
Wright, Kathryn 
(2000) "Gender Bending in Games" 
http://www.womengamers.com/articles/gender.html