Gender and New Media

The New-Media Gender Gap

One of the clearest examples of the gender gap in new media today is the paucity of women computer scientists in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, nearly 75 percent of tomorrow's jobs will require the use of computers, yet fewer than 33 percent of participants in today's computer courses and related activities are girls. Ironically, the notion that computing is “men's work” isn't at all historically accurate. From Ada Lovelace to Patti Maes, history abounds with examples of gifted women computer programmers and software engineers. Indeed, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference is held each year to honor such pioneers.

Recently, educators and government agencies have attempted to launch a full-out attack on the stereotype of women as computer illiterates. As a recent American Association of University Women Education report put it, “As violent electronic games and dull programming classes turn off more and more girls to the computer culture, schools need to change the way information technology is used, applied, and taught in the nation's classrooms.” One such new approach, “summer technology camps,” is used by the Women in Technology Program to encourage young girls.

Another can be found in the work of Brenda Laurel, who “simply wanted to find out what it would take to motivate a little girl to put her hands on the computer and become comfortable with it.” To do this, she conducted extensive interviews with young girls regarding their likes and dislikes in video games, striving to create interactive experiences that girls could enjoy.

In addition to the gender gap in computer-science classrooms, a serious scarcity of women existed on the Internet until the mid-1990s. As late as 1994, CompuServe estimated that females made up only 12 percent of their cyberspace population. In a 1993 study, Leslie Regan Shade discovered that even in “women's spaces” online, male posts outnumbered female in frequency and length. And in 1994, linguist Susan Herring found that men were more verbose and “adversarial” than women online. Herring, who studied eight separate online mailing lists, argued that the Internet often reproduced, and sometimes exaggerated, long-standing communication inequities faced by women in the real world every day.

These discoveries alarmed a number of feminist activists, who feared that women might be left behind in the “Internet revolution” in the 1990s. As early as 1987, Anita Borg began the Systers mailing list with a singular goal: Get more women using the Internet. Feminist magazines and book publishers followed suit, offering “female-friendly” instructions for getting online. And efforts were made by people like Stacy Horn, who began the New York City–based bulletin-board system ECHO with the express purpose of actively recruiting women's perspectives. Internationally, groups like the Electronic Witches made an effort to get women online in places like the former Yugoslavia.

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