“Computer networks do not guarantee gender-free, equal-opportunity interaction, any more than any previous communication technology has had that effect,” wrote Susan Herring, now an associate professor of information science in the IU Bloomington School of Library and Information Science (SLIS), in an article appearing in a 2000 Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility newsletter.

If that statement surprises you, it may be only because you weren’t aware of early hopes for what the Internet might do for society. Or, if you are a non-believer in what Herring called the “great civil libertarian experiment that was the Internet of the 1980s and 1990s,” perhaps it’s because you’ve read Men are from Mars; Women are from Venus, by John Gray, or You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation, by Deborah Tannen. Both are “relationship” books meant to help men and women understand the differences between their communication styles. Whatever you think about the Internet or he said/she said talk, there is little doubt that computer network communication has created new possibilities.

“The Internet offers to women, and men, unprecedented opportunities to connect and communicate with others online,” said Herring, who also is director of the SLIS doctoral program at IU. “Whether it be in public discussion forums, chat rooms or via private E-mail, today’s wired generation is communicating more than past generations. Online communication facilitates professional networking, community development and grassroots political organization among people who share a common cause. And the World Wide Web provides seemingly limitless opportunities for entrepreneurial activity and self-expression.

“Women, especially, stand to benefit from these potentials,” she continued, “in that the openness—what some call the democratic nature—of the Internet means that traditional obstacles to women’s participation in certain kinds of activities, such as business and politics, are removed.

“At least that’s what many people have claimed, starting from the early days of the Internet and continuing, in the case of the Web, up to the present.”

But we all know that “claims” tend to fall short of reality. Books, in addition to Gray’s and Tannen’s, started coming out in the early 1990s and showed that gender was often evident in communication styles, even when people were unaware of any such gender-based behavior. And, according to Herring, the Internet is far more likely to duplicate those behaviors than to obliterate them.

“In public discussion groups, for example, women generally tend to be more polite and supportive of others, and men tend to be more assertive, sarcastic and adversarial,” said Herring in providing examples of carry-over characteristics.

Different gender-based characteristics show up in synchronous and asynchronous online communication groups. Use E-mail as an example of asynchronous communication, which doesn’t require the receiver to be logged on in order to receive a message. Synchronous online communication, on the other hand, is when the sender and receiver(s) must be logged on at the same time in order to exchange messages.

Some differences can be measured quantitatively. In asynchronous groups, men post more and longer messages, said Herring, while in synchronous chat, they use more profanity and make more sexual references. But women type more ‘emoticons’—smiley faces and representations of laughter.

Men and women, according to Herring, also establish different “rules of Netiquette” in group communications. Women-centered groups and groups moderated by women tend to emphasize respect for others and restrict certain kinds of contentious exchange, she explained, while mixed-sex groups and groups moderated by men tend to tolerate contentious debate and place more emphasis on avoidance of imposition.

Herring said that in many respects, the Internet reproduces the larger societal gender status quo.

“Top-level control of Internet resources, infrastructure and content is exercised mostly by men,” she explained. “One of the largest activities on the Internet—the distribution of pornography—is not only largely controlled by men, but casts women as sexual objects for men’s use. The sexualization of women also carries over into ostensibly neutral domains, such as recreational chat and personal home pages.

“In serious contexts, such as academic discussion groups, women participate and are responded to less than men,” she continued. “Moreover, women have to form their own groups to address their interests, suggesting that the default activities on the Internet address the interests of men.

“This evidence points to the persistence of gender disparity in online contexts according to the same hierarchy that privileges males over females offline.”

Despite the seemingly naive, optimistic hopes for delivering us from gender-ruled communication environments, Herring believes that the Internet reflects and reproduces offline gender arrangements more than it transforms them.

“From the outset, research on computer-mediated communication found that offline, gendered communication patterns, including male control of public discussion and gender-based harassment, carried over onto the Internet,” she said. “Now that the numbers of female and male Internet users are nearing parity, those same behaviors are still evident.”

There is a trend toward mass-media infiltration of the Internet—which tends to reinforce traditional gender roles—just as those roles have been reinforced on television. She pointed to women’s Web portals, for example, which she said are looking more and more like women’s mainstream magazines, complete with horoscopes and relationship advice.

“The explanations for this are social and economic, not technological,” she said. “The designers and earliest users of the Internet were white, middle-class males whose norms and values shaped its early culture. The recent permeation of the Web by commerce and the mass media reinforces the traditional gender status quo and backs it with powerful financial interests.”