It came down to this: The men were certain they did well, while the women were wracked by self-doubt. Or they are told to “ lighten up” and that… it’s just “harmless locker-room talk.”
#Cult animosity shows no sign up free
Women who are increasingly speaking out against harassers are frequently accused of wanting to stifle free speech. The difference was in their self-assessments. In terms of sheer ability, the sexes were equal. In a revealing study conducted twice over a span of five years–and yielding the same results both times–Hargittai tested and interviewed 100 Internet users and found that there was no significant variation in their online competency. Some of the obstacles to online engagement are psychological, unconscious, and invidious. Put simply, closing the so-called digital divide still leaves a noticeable gap the more privileged your background, the more likely that you’ll reap the additional benefits of new technologies.
“These findings suggest that Internet access may not, in and of itself, level the playing field when it comes to potential pay-offs of being online,” warns Eszter Hargittai, a sociologist at Northwestern University. Socioeconomic status, race, and gender all play significant roles in a who’s who of the online world, with men considerably more likely to participate than women. Even among the highly connected college-age set, research reveals a stark divergence in rates of online participation.
#Cult animosity shows no sign up professional
In professional fields like philosophy, law, and science, where blogging has become popular, women are notoriously underrepresented by one count, for instance, only around 20% of science bloggers are women.Īn otherwise optimistic white paper by the British think tank Demos touching on the rise of amateur creativity online reported that white males are far more likely to be “hobbyists with professional standards” than other social groups, while you won’t be shocked to learn that low-income women with dependent children lag far behind. Though a handful of high-powered celebrity “mommy bloggers” have managed to attract massive audiences and ad revenue by documenting their daily travails, they are the exceptions not the rule. Just take a look at gender and the Web comes quickly into focus, leaving you with a vivid sense of which direction the Internet is heading in and–small hint–it’s not toward equality or democracy.Įxperts, Trolls, and What Your Mom Doesn’t KnowĪs a start, in the perfectly real world women shoulder a disproportionate share of household and child-rearing responsibilities, leaving them substantially less leisure time to spend online. Not surprisingly, then, well-off white men are wildly overrepresented both in the tech industry and online. Powerful and exceedingly familiar hierarchies have come to define the digital realm, whether you’re considering its economics or the social world it reflects and represents. In fact, as anyone knows who has followed the histories of Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook, now among the biggest companies in the world, the Web is increasingly a winner-take-all, rich-get-richer sort of place, which means the disparate percentages in those power laws are only likely to look uglier over time. Its traffic, for instance, tends to be distributed according to “power laws,” which follow what’s known as the 80/20 rule–80% of a desirable resource goes to 20% of the population. The Web is regularly hailed for its “openness” and that’s where the confusion begins, since “open” in no way means “equal.” While the Internet may create space for many voices, it also reflects and often amplifies real-world inequities in striking ways.Īn elaborate system organized around hubs and links, the Web has a surprising degree of inequality built into its very architecture. This story first appeared on the TomDispatch website.
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