Gender and Online Forums

Anonymity is a central aspect of the Internet and the constant connectivity it affords. By identifying oneself by an ambiguous handle and a made-up avatar, one can escape prejudices and discrimination based on appearances, race, and gender. However, some of these aspects of identity are manifested in behaviors that cannot be easily hidden by a unisex user name.

This is illustrated by a New York Times report analyzing recent demographic studies by Wikipedia. The survey revealed that approximately 87 percent of the people who edit Wikipedia are men. The Times article cites experts who explain this gender gap as a result of "an ideology that resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a [hard-driving hacker] culture that may discourage women," or as a result of "women [being] less willing to assert their opinions in public." The former theory implies that diversity is actually discouraged in free-form internet forums simply because it is a goal that "real-world" institutions often promote. The latter suggests that even when people are freed from their identities online, their personalities still dictate their actions.

Catherine Orenstein with the OpEd Project (an initiative to increase diversity in media), another expert consulted by the Times, also addresses gender identity. She attributes the Internet taciturnity of women to their tendency to focus on themselves as individuals, rather than the worldly value of their knowledge, when posting information to public forums. She offers the example of self confidence: "'do I know enough, am I bragging?'" This would suggest that men are more likely to share their knowledge with less concern about what others will think of them. Conflicts such as this are personality features correlated with gender that are still evident on the Internet.

Congruently, 2010 study in Information, Communication & Society found that although women often appreciate the value of anonymity to conceal gender, they feel that it is "associated with feelings of distance and barriers to effective communication" (Martey 1222), which seems to be a feminine social concern. Martey also cites 2002 research by Postmes and Spears which concluded that "gender identity and roles, even in anonymity contexts, can influence perceptions of both the self and of others" (1221). This implies that gender does indeed result in differentiated online behavior.

This correlatiom is also reflected in some older data about words commonly used by male and female bloggers. The statistics indicate that women often write about their personal lives, as evidenced by the high frequencies of the words "husband" and "mom." Men are more likely to write about politics ("democracy") or technology ("Linux"). This demonstrates a similar principle. The topics about which the writer is expected to have expertise are generally left to male bloggers, and more free-form, personal topics are dominated by female bloggers. The results of a similar study in 2010, presented graphically, indicate this gender gap has not closed much since 2007, when the statistics were collected. The Wikipedia study is further proof.

This raises some interesting questions about how gender differences on public online forums will change in the future. Perhaps people will start behaving differently online in order to make the anonymity more complete, widening the rift between Internet and "real-life" personalities. This would increase the degree of homogenization of Internet-mediated communications, but also continue to allow people to overcome prejudices and discrimination.

The other side of this is that people might begin to use linguistic or behavioral cues to break down the barriers of anonymity. For instance, a cyberbully might learn to identify female users by the way they word messages or strategize in online games and make sexist comments to hurt them. This is an obvious negative effect, but maintaining gender identity online would have benefits as well.

Any path that Internet culture takes seems unpredictable, evincing a mixture of positive and negative effects. This is why it is so interesting and scary to watch social evolution within and around burgeoning forms of technology.