What do you think about men and women’s uses of technology and the Internet?

What are your experiences as a man, or as a woman, of technology, the Internet and this site’s message boards?


Hello,

My name is Lynette and I’m a researcher (academic) looking at gender and technology on the Internet. I have chosen to look at SciForums as the message boards on this site are lively and discuss issues of technology. I would be very grateful if people could discuss with me their views on gender and the uses of technology, and their experiences of these message boards and of the Internet in general. I’m specifically interested in issues such as:

• Gender cultures on these forums and online in general

• Whether people disclose their gender when posting on these forums

• How people feel as a man or as a woman posting on these forums

• Whether people’s gender influences how people treat them on these message boards and online in general

• Whether there are differences in how men and women use and discuss technology

• Whether people’s identities are shaped in anyway by the technologies that they interact with, and if so how?

Please also feel free to discuss anything else that you feel is relevant to the subject of gender and technology and feel free to respond to other people’s posts - I would like to encourage a discussion of the topic rather than a survey response.

Thank you for your help and time.


Anonymity: All responses will be anonymised prior to the writing up of my notes – the name of the site and individual’s usernames will be changed.

Fuck anonymity, you have permission to quote my username. :)

On this forum, I sense I'm expected to tolerate certain stereotypes. I notice that I'm expected to accept that men and women are different in certain ways, even if I don't see evidence of those things, or if I see clear evidence that they are caused by social factors rather than immutably wired in the brain. If I question these things I'm seen as a rabid feminist who wants to eliminate gender differences, whether or not I'm making a valid point seems to be secondary.

Online in general, I notice that a certain low level of misogyny seems to be expected and seen as reasonable. Men can complain about women, and that's understood and sympathized with. Women complain about men, they're being misandrists. I also notice that misogyny in the form of jokes is seen as acceptable, but when similar misandrist jokes are made, they're seen as unreasonable and sexist. Likewise, responding to a misogynist joke with anything other than laughter is seen as unnecessary PC ranting.

I think I'd often have an easier time if I pretended to be a male, but I refuse to do that. It's my internet too.

I find that gender does influence how people treat you. On this forum I don't really notice anything, but on a lot of forums you're seen as an add-on or a kind of special needs member if you're female.

I use the net allot and find it very useful, rewarding, insightful and a cornucopia of other superlatives.

visceral_instinct thank you getting the discussion started. So would you say that gender is less of an issue on this forum than a lot of others? If so, why do you think that is? Are there differences in the types of people that go on this forum as opposed to others? Or is it more to do with the topics being discussed?

I think it's less of an issue here because people are expected to behave civilly, and also to discuss things using logic and accept that they might be wrong about things. Whereas on other forums that aren't about science, and thus logic and reason are not so heavily emphasized, people feel free to just say 'but that's the way it is' and complain that you are questioning things at all. Or on certain forums people just post things like 'Show us your tits or piss off', and the mods don't care.

visceral_instinct is it the case that there are stricter behavioural codes on forums such as this?

What do you think about men and women’s uses of technology and the Internet?

What are your experiences as a man, or as a woman, of technology, the Internet and this site’s message boards?


Unrelated to this particular message board? I'd say most of what I've noticed are just numbers and skill-sets.

In my 11+ years of internet usage, I have noticed a couple of trends. For starters, most of the people I've interacted with pretty much anywhere are always predominantly male. Virtually every message board/chat room/whatever that facilitates online discussion is always mostly men.
In the days before internet was a household thing, the majority of computer-people I interacted with were male. This includes gaming as well (arcades, consoles, PC, etc).
I've noticed that women tended to avoid computers when it was more complicated to use it. I met more men who were willing to deal with convoluted PC tasks -- like entering command lines. When computer use skyrocketed with the development of the desktop OS - I started to see a variety of men who are either tech savvy or unskilled, but the majority of women I encountered were unskilled.
I've met very few women who know how to do any sort of innocuous "nuts and bolts" tech stuff (like properly install an OS, put cards in an expansion slot, install drivers. knowledgeably change settings in BIOS, etc).
I see more men willing to gamble on trying the latest tech, or explore the different settings within an application.

I bought my wife a digital camera for Christmas one year. It look her 3 or 4 months to finally get brave enough to start using it. Same with the Printer I bought her the year before, and the scanner a few months before that.




As for SciForums - most posters are men (like everywhere else). The women here are usually pretty darn smart as far as the actual subjects go, but I haven't encountered any who knowledgeably answer computer related questions.

My hunch is that it's a cultural thing. I think this because there's always an exception to the rule everywhere you go. I've encountered plenty of women on car tuner forums (for example) who were raised in a garage and are considered knowledgeable respected "senior members" within the communities. Hypothetically, a tech savvy woman could start posting here one day.



My name is Lynette and I’m a researcher (academic) looking at gender and technology on the Internet. I have chosen to look at SciForums as the message boards on this site are lively and discuss issues of technology. I would be very grateful if people could discuss with me their views on gender and the uses of technology, and their experiences of these message boards and of the Internet in general. I’m specifically interested in issues such as:

• Gender cultures on these forums and online in general

• Whether people disclose their gender when posting on these forums

• How people feel as a man or as a woman posting on these forums

• Whether people’s gender influences how people treat them on these message boards and online in general

• Whether there are differences in how men and women use and discuss technology

• Whether people’s identities are shaped in anyway by the technologies that they interact with, and if so how?

Please also feel free to discuss anything else that you feel is relevant to the subject of gender and technology and feel free to respond to other people’s posts - I would like to encourage a discussion of the topic rather than a survey response.

Thank you for your help and time.


Anonymity: All responses will be anonymised prior to the writing up of my notes – the name of the site and individual’s usernames will be changed.


I don't mind. You have permission to use my user-name. It's relatively anonymous in and of itself.

I have noticed that [users who identify themselves as] women tend to get a lot more attention than males do. I'm pretty sure it works just like any other social environment - although I am interested in what it would be like if there were equal numbers.
I unintentionally used a female-sounding name in a chat room once --- everywhere I went, I would get numerous arbitrary private messages from people pushing to interact with me. Makes me ponder whether or not all women get a lot of PMs because I don't get any as a clearly defined male. Heck - the only time it ever happens to me nowadays is if I'm forwarding a specific question to somebody.

Hi Lynette,

I'm an administrator of this forum. I'll restrict myself to commenting specifically about this forum, rather than generally about technology and the internet - those are huge topics!

sciforums bills itself as an "intelligent community". As such, I like to think that many of our members are more interested in what a person thinks about things than about his or her gender. Many posters here use gender-neutral user names. This suggests to me that people here don't consider their gender the most important thing about their online identity. Also, when new members sign up here, we don't usually have existing members immediately asking the person's age, sex and location, as often happens elsewhere on the internet.

Having said that, most people end up disclosing their gender sooner or later, intentionally or unintentionally. When members are careful not to disclose their gender, others may be more enclined to probe them to find out. The end result is that I think that most of the long-term members here know the genders of the other members. People occasionally make mistakes, though, such as referring to a woman's post with male pronouns like "he wrote..." or "his opinion is..." . When that happens, two or three people will often point out the error. So, gender is far from invisible here.

I agree with others who have said that women tend to attract more personal attention that men here. Women signing up with an obviously female handle are almost invariably asked personal questions about themselves, in a way that men are not. Things quickly settle down as the woman becomes a regular member, but I don't think anybody forgets that she is a woman.

One of the things that annoys me a little as somebody who would like to see more people sign up here is that sciforums tends to present an unforgiving and unwelcoming initial impression to new members. There are some here who are more likely to try to score intellectual points against new posters than perhaps they would against established members. New members, it seems to me, have to run a gauntlet to prove that they can match wits with the existing members. If they can hold their own under questioning of their ideas and sometimes their values then they are welcomed. But I wouldn't say we're a warm and cuddly, tolerant-of-all-comers kind of forum. Maybe that has to do with the kinds of issues that get discussed here, including the big no-nos of polite conversation: religion, politics and sex.

We also have a strong culture of intolerance of "crackpots", though paradoxically we have a "Pseudoscience" forum. I'll wager that there are more than the average number of people educated in science than you'd find on many forums, and we also have a large atheist contingent, many of whom view religion as a form of stupidity.

Because we're a forum with a scientific bent, and because women are perhaps more likely to be people-oriented as compared to technology-oriented, we have more male members here than female members. The long-term female members we do have tend to be strong, intelligent women who are more than able to stand up to the boys.

It's probably fair to say that sciforums has a "male" feel about it, in terms of the way that topics are discussed as well as the attitude taken where views conflict. I don't see many threads where issues are discussed dispassionately with the aim of reaching consensus. Instead, we mostly see "male" ways of interacting - challenges back and forth, an adversarial approach taken where disagreements arise, strong disagreements that descend to name-calling rather than an agreement to disagree. Maybe this is because the majority of our members are male, or maybe the causation goes the other way. It is probably worth mentioning, though, that some of the "bitchiest" arguments I have seen between members who have a personality clash have been between two female members. When men disagree strongly, they tend to belittle each other, but when women disagree they can tend to attack each other's reputation.

Anyway, that's a few thoughts for a start...

visceral_instinct is it the case that there are stricter behavioural codes on forums such as this?

Yes.

On some forums, it's normal behaviour to constantly post sexual comments to a female member, and if she complains she's seen as just whining about nothing.

Yes.

On some forums, it's normal behaviour to constantly post sexual comments to a female member, and if she complains she's seen as just whining about nothing.

yeah, I've been to boards like that. But I'm a grown up so I don't stay.

I don't either. I get bored. These forums are usually the same ones where people post threads about their bowel movements or favourite disgusting porn clips a la '2 girls one cup', and deliberately spell most of their words wrong.

Hmmm VI...this board has posted all of the above...

Hmmm VI...this board has posted all of the above...


LOL so true.

Yes Nietzsche, but those people, happily, are the minority here.

Most of us talk science, or have logical debates or discussions, as opposed to random bits of porn or talking about pooing for fun, and we use grammar properly.