Gender and the Internet

From its inception in the latter half of the 20th century, the Internet has been a social tool that has reflected general attitudes and participation about gender among other social factors, viewed through the distinctive prism that the Internet imposes on communication. In addition, the study of gender differences in Internet use is sometimes used as a measure of gender differences and similarities in communication, of gender and sex roles, and of the reaction to and use of technology.

As technological innovator Tim Berners-Lee explains, the Internet was originally a tool for a relatively small audience, an audience of users who were predominantly conservative white men in positions of entrenched power. Indeed, the Internet was first used in the early 1970s as a means of communication for U.S. Department of Defense scientists and other defense researchers. The Internet rapidly developed into a tool for U.S. scholarly and research communication in general. (With a goal of promoting scholarly and research communication outside of the United States, Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web in 1989 as a tool for European scholars to share information; both tools are often referred to as the original entity, the Internet.) Regardless of original intent and usage by men, even the most cursory examinations demonstrate that the Internet is now accessed and used by women both at home and in the workplace, and that differences in these access and use patterns are more often either (a) minor or (b) explicable by women's different occupations and depressed salaries.

By 2000, the Internet had become a global means of communication available to anyone with access to a computer with a modem. The Internet is characterized by communication that can be rapid, uncensored, and difficult to modify once transmitted. Internet communication can occur in real time or as the static posting of type and other images. Because it is no longer restricted to scientific or scholarly usage, the Internet reflects such generally significant socially constructed categories as race and ethnicity, socio-economic status, sexuality, sexual preference, and, of course, gender, as described in this entry.