Can you always tell the difference between men and women? Okay, most of the time it's easy, but what about when you're on the Internet? If you are communicating in a chat room or an a discussion list and someone is using a name like "Sky" or "avid reader" would you be able to tell which side of the gender divide your new friend hails from?
No, says Internet enthusiast Fiona McCann (23), who is a regular visitor to a writers' chat room: "The Net is almost like a gender-free zone. There's a lot of freedom in that there's no question of what gender you are. The pigeon-holing which goes on in certain social situations is redundant on the Net.
"People can be what they want to be - if a guy wants to talk about `female' things he can go into a female chat room and nobody will know he's male. Sometimes you assume someone is a woman and then they tell you they're a guy, which makes you wonder about your own preconceptions. But there's always the possibility they're lying!"
Research, however, does not support McCann's belief in the sexual democracy of the Net. According to Susan Herring, Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas, differing linguistic styles give the game away. In her Gender Differences in Computer-Mediated Communication, Herring comments: "Women and men have recognisably different styles in posting to the Internet, contrary to the claim that computer-mediated communication (CMC) neutralises distinctions of gender."
Herring, who spent several years lurking (or what she prefers to call "carrying out ethnographic observation") on a discussion list for linguists, found that women's messages were more supportive, appreciative and informative while men's postings tended to be more critical, assertive and sarcastic.
"A daunting 68 per cent of the messages posted by men made use of an adversarial style in which the poster distanced himself from, criticised, and/or ridiculed other participants, often while promoting his own importance.
"The few women who participated in the discussion, in contrast, displayed features of attenuation - hedging, apologising, asking questions rather than making assertions - and a tendency toward the personal, revealing thoughts and feelings and interacting with and supporting others."
When "Suzi" posted a message on a discussion list advocating "denunciation of one's colleagues" one woman commented: "I was surprised to find a female name at the end of it." She was right to be surprised: it transpired that a male had been posing as a female. In another case, a "man" posted on a discussion list: "I sometimes feel guilty for taking up bandwidth" and a woman, correctly, expressed suspicion about the true gender of the poster. Herring comments: "She recognised that anyone expressing . . . consideration for the desires of others was likely to be female." The gender-specific language chasm between male and female CMC comes as no surprise to lecturer in Communications at Dublin City University, Brian Trench: "It is only a reproduction of what happens face-toface." He is, however, surprised at another difference between the sexes: "I'm on a journalists' discussion list and I'm amazed at the amount of time some men spend online."
Herring's research found that messages posted by men tended to be longer than those from women (some messages from men were ten screens long while women's postings averaged one screen or less). She concludes: "While a short message does not necessarily indicate the sex of the sender, a very long message invariably indicates that the sender is male."
Women's contributions increase when the subject under discussion is people rather than issues. According to Herring: "Men were found to contribute most to discussions of issues, followed by information postings (ie where they provided information, solicited or otherwise), followed by queries and personal discussions. Women, on the other hand, contribute most to personal discussions (talk about linguists, as opposed to talk about linguistics) . . . with issues and information postings least frequent."
In the non-academic world of chat rooms, Fiona McCann finds that men participate more than women and speculates it is because they feel more comfortable revealing personal information in the safe anonymity provided by the Net. "They are more likely to reveal themselves on the Net than among their peers. Women have more communication and support from friends so they don't need the Net as much," she theorises.
Women tend to be better than men at picking up visual clues on the sub-text of a conversation but, in cyberspace, the shifty eyes, uneasy posture or nervous smile of your "friend" are invisible. "Computers might be too objective or clinical for women, who like the eye contact and body language of face-to-face contact," says McCann. This might explain why women are more likely than men to use "emoticons" or "smiley faces" to express the emotion normally communicated by looks or, on the phone, by intonation.
One disincentive for women to post on discussion lists or to use the Net fully is the problem of "flaming" (i.e. using derogatory or abusive language). Herring found that while it is virtually only men who flame, over 70 per cent of both sexes feel intimidated and/or irritated by such adversarial language.
However, women and men react differently, with males viewing flaming "as part of academic interaction" and one male respondent to Herring's research commented: "Actually, the barbs and arrows were entertaining, because of course they weren't aimed at me." Many women, on the other hand, expressed disgust and "a deep aversion and a concern to avoid interactions of this kind."
A recent survey by the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Centre (GVU) at Georgia Tech in the US found that, for the first time, women outnumber men among new Internet users - and girls are beginning to catch up with boys. Among "netizens" who have been online for under a year, almost 52 per cent are female, and, among those aged between 11 and 20, nearly 44 per cent are female.
More women and girls on the Net may or may not bring about greater cyber-equality, but it will be interesting to see what changes, if any, occur in the chat rooms and on the discussion lists of cyberspace.
Sarah Marriott is at sarah marriott@hotmail.com