The leap to cyberspace: Are we typing in pink and blue?
When men and women show up in cyberspace, can you tell which is which by what they say and how they say it? Some people have suggested this, but given how subtle and fleeting the differences often are, I find that assertion highly unlikely. Also, we have a whole new set of registers with different social contexts, and while some of the same differences are appearing, others are not.
You might expect, for example, that women's tendency to inject a bit more emotion into their language might lead to more of those smiley faces in their online messages. Diane Witmer and Sandra Lee Katzman scoured 3,000 newsgroup posts for such graphic accents and found that women did indeed include more of them in their posts than the men did. However, they were not all that widely used by anyone. Only 13.2% of the posts contained them. A shocker from the same study was that the women were sending more flames and challenges than the men. There weren't many posts from women - just 16.4% of the total - but they did contain proportionally more zingers than the ones from males.
Susan C. Herring at the University of Texas, Arlington, looked at interaction sytles on the Internet and also found a few surprises. One involved the way men and women were using the Internet. Given their socioemotional orientation, one might suppose women use the net mainly to promote and maintain interpersonal relationships, while the task-oriented men use it to share information. Things are just not that j simple.
To get at this issue in a more systematic way, Herring examined the structure of the posts made to two mailing lists that include both men and women, looking first at the way posters organized their messages, and second at the content. One was LINGUIST, a discussion forum for academics involved in the study of linguistics, and the other was WMST, another academic list for people interested in women's studies. Both forums have many thousands of subscribers and are quite active, but WMST is mainly women, while LINGUIST is mainly male. The LINGUIST discussion under the microscope whirled around the term cognitive linguistics, a controversial one to linguists, while the WMST discussion was about sex differences in the brain.
Herring first identified five sets of macro segments that commonly appeared in the messages. Two were epistolary conventions: a salutation at the beginning (such as "To Joe:") and a signature file or other kind of formal closing at the end. Within the messages, a common macro segment was an introduction that might serve various purposes, such as making some link to the content of a previous post. The body of the message might do different things as well: express the author's views, request or provide information, express feelings, or suggest a solution. Many messages also contained some closing remark. These were rarely formal closings, but they wound down the message and made a more casual exit with an appeal to hear others' views, an apology for long-windedness, or even a snide remark that berated the other participants. This microscopic analysis of the message structures was intriguing, first because it demonstrated that certain elements were quite common on both lists. Obviously, norms had developed and the posters tended to ape one another. Very few, for example, included any salutation (such as Dear List Members:), and a majority began their posts by linking to some previous message. Most also included a signature file, though almost none include any kind of complimentary close or postscript. Analyzing the frequencies of the different kinds of macro segments in the mostly male and mostly female lists, Herring found considerable similarity.
For example, the most common elements on both lists were an expression of views and information sharing. Clearly, both men and women participate on these Internet forums for similar reasons - to share information and viewpoints. Surprisingly, and belying the stereotype that men are more concerned with the exchange of information than women are, requesting and providing information were more common on WMST than on LINGUIST. In the male-dominated LINGUIST discussion, most posters were expressing opinions, not sharing hard facts. You may recall from chapter 1 that study on the electronic language register and how it resembles the public interview, or the spontaneous speech. Given the demographics at the time, most of that material probably came from men.
Another gender difference on these lists seemed to support stereotypes about the competitive, aggressive male, and the supportive, relationship-oriented female. Herring identified two different variants of the basic message that begins with a link to someone else's post and then goes on to expand it in some way. The first is the "aligned variant," in which the author is supporting the person who contributed the original point, while the second is the "opposed variant," in which the writer takes a critical and opposing stance, sometimes quite aggressively. An example of the former might open with, "I completely agree with S.T. and want to also point out that..." Contrast that with, "J.K.'s remark took me by surprise because it is so completely without data to back it." Those opposed variants would be reasonably polite on professional forums like these, but they can burn a hole in your screen on others.
In these discussions, the percentage of aligned variants was much higher on the WMST list than the LINGUIST list. More than four times as many messages began with an aligned style opening on WMST compared to LINGUIST. The appearance of opposed variants was even more telling. They were almost nonexistent on the WMST discussion, but were extremely common in LINGUIST. Since WMST posts come mainly from women and LINGUIST posts come mainly from men, the tempting conclusion is that interaction styles show quite a large gender difference on these lists. Herring nailed this down further by looking at individual posts and linking them to the gender of the sender, regardless of list. The data were very clear: the vast majority of the aligned variants came from women, while remarkably few came from men. For the opposed variant, the results were opposite.