The new battlefield for the war between the sexes
Conflicts between men and women happen online, just as they do in real life, and one thing that seems to trigger them is when women break out of the stereotype. Without thinking much about it, one man participated in a discussion group using his wife's Internet account and was astounded when he received harsh criticism from some of the men in the group. They definitely did not like that dominant and assertive posting style from a putative female, but his wife enjoyed watching him learn a lesson in gender stereotypes. Susan Herring and her colleagues studied two examples of gender conflicts that occurred on professional mailing lists, analyzing their causes and the strategies the men and women used to debate and discuss, especially as things became tense. One discussion occurred on MBU, Megabyte University, a forum for the discussion of computers and the teaching of English composition, and the other occurred on LINGUIST. At the time of the study, men were in the majority on both lists, but not overwhelmingly so.
The trouble on MBU started when one of the men posted a message saying he intended to develop a new course on men's literature. He planned to examine works by Robert Bly, Ernest Hemingway, and others from the point of view of the men's movement. Other group members obligingly sent in some ideas for readings, but one woman voiced concern about the legitimacy of the course itself, arguing that male viewpoints already dominate literature courses anyway. Eventually, the group split along gender lines and the discussion became so contentious that one member threatened to unsubscribe in a huff.
For LINGUIST, the conflict began when a woman described a billboard in Salt Lake City that showed a Corvette, with the caption, "If your date's a dog, get a vet." The car dealer had received criticism about it, but he insisted it was not sexist and dog could be either male or female. The poster asked LINGUIST participants for usage examples of the word dog to bolster her argument that the sign was sexist and demeaning to women. In this discussion, too, women began participating at a much higher rate than usual and the debate split along gender lines, just as it did on MBU.
Herring and her colleagues suggest that the men, who typically dominated the discussion in these groups, employed some very subtle tactics to regain control when the participation from women grew to unusually high levels. The first tactic was avoidance; on MBU, none of the men responded to the women's concerns about the men's lit course for more than two weeks. Finally, a woman remarked about this tactic:
I am fascinated that my thoughtful [...] response on the "men's lit" thread was met with silence. My own fledgling analysis of MBU discourse from last summer suggests that there is a real pattern of male response to males and lack of response to females in "important" topics on MBU (Here I mean socially important.) When threads initiated by women die from lack of response that's silencing; when women do not respond on threads initiated by men for reasons to do with fear (and the fear may be fear of verbal or other reprisal, ridicule, whatever) - that's silencing.
Another tactic involved diverting attention away from the message the women were trying to express, often by focusing on a tangential piece of the message but not its real intent. In one of her posts, a woman made an analogy between men's lit courses and King Claudius in Hamlet, and a man who responded chose to discuss how Shakespeare is taught rather than the concern the women were voicing. A woman replied:
It's like ellen and many of us are trying to make some points about why this men's lit issue is going to the core and eating away, and the come back is not dealing with the issue but with the text used to make the example; it's frustrating, are you (in general) listening to what's being communicated?
As the conflicts in these groups heated up, the proportion of messages and words contributed by women reached far higher levels than usual. Typically, their contributions were proportionally much smaller, both in terms of number of messages and number of words. On LINGUIST, for example, the women, who comprised 36% of the subscribers, posted only 20% of the total messages, and a mere 12% of the words (because their messages were shorter). For a few days on both lists - at the height of the conflicts - these proportions shifted and women contributed slightly more than the men. This was the point at which anger surfaced and men thought the discussion was "going too far!" In MBU, men start complaining about being silenced by the women's voices, and one threatened to unsubscribe. The quantitative analysis, however, shows that men actually contributed 70% of the words overall to the discussion, suggesting that "silencing" is a subjective matter. After the discussions ended, women on both lists dropped down to their usual low contribution level.
Many of the conflicts in which the debaters split along gender lines seem to revolve around gender issues themselves, as these two discussions did. They can get surprisingly vitriolic on the Internet, even in professional groups. That group polarization phenomenon seems to operate very quickly as men move to one side of the battlefield and women the other, marching further and further apart and out to the extremes. The tendency toward more disinhibited behavior exacerbates the tension, because people may start saying things they regret later. The man who threatened to quit, for example, apologized after he cooled off. Because gender is such a salient feature of your online persona and stereotyping is so easy to do, this problem may not completely disappear when the ratio becomes more balanced unless we better understand why these conflicts occur online, and what we can do to defuse them.