Research on the Gender-Technology Relation
Before describing some of the research on gender and the internet, it is helpful to situate it within a significant body of research that has examined how communication technologies have been gendered, both through their social uses-which have often been unintended-and their design. The telephone, the radio, and the television have been the focus of much of this research. The use of these technologies to both forge new communities and nurture existing place-based communities has been a recurrent theme.
The telephone is particularly illustrative here. As Rakow (1992) and Moyal (1992) showed, women have used the telephone as a tool of community bonding and family "kin keeping." Rakow's 1985 ethnographic study on women's use of the telephone in a small community in the midwestern United States revealed how the telephone is a gendered technology:
The telephone is a site on which the meanings of gender are expressed and practiced. Use of the telephone by women is both gendered work-work delegated to women-and gender work-work that confirms the community's beliefs about what are women's natural tendencies and abilities. A Moyal's (1992) research for the Australian federal government on the prospective impact of timed local calls on women concluded that there was a distinctive feminine use of the telephone. Women's use of the telephone was primarily for keeping in touch with family: "The study has revealed a pervasive, deeply rooted, dynamic feminine culture of the telephone in which kin-keeping, caring, mutual support, friendship, [and] volunteer and community activity play a central part".
However, as Martin (1991) demonstrated in a historical study of the rollout of telephone services in Canada, the original purpose of the telephone, envisioned by Bell Canada, was as a tool for businessmen. The feminization of the telephone became apparent first when women were hired as operators and then later when a viable culture of the telephone developed for socialization. Telephone technology and design has since changed considerably so as to appeal to the female consumer, reflecting its status as an indispensable domestic artifact through stylistic trends, including colors (from plain black to pale hues), design (from the Princess telephone to the cartoon-licensed telephones), and technological innovations (from push-button telephones to portables).
Gender, consumption, and technology relations have also been documented by scholars. They have pointed out how technologies that exist in the women's sphere (e.g., domestic technologies) are often not considered "real" technologies. It is assumed that these "technologies of consumption" (Lubar, 1998) are to be consumed by women in a passive fashion. Technological designers and promoters rarely consider that technologies can be used or resisted in unforeseen ways.
When the internet first burst onto the public screen during the mid-1990s, popular culture and the media tended to reflect women as cyber-phobic, victims of harassment, or potential online pickup material. Early academic research on gender online examined the participation of women in computer science and computer networking, noting the paucity of women in the educational and industrial sectors and paying particular attention to access issues, social interactions, and pornography. Thus, questions of access and equity were seen as a major issue, with the goal to ensure gender parity.
Other academic studies have since examined the interpersonal dynamics of online gender/computer-mediated language use such as conversational analysis in internet relay chat (IRC) and listservs (Herring, 1999) and gender negotiation in a multi-user domain (Kendall, 2002). Identity and issues of "gender bending" in virtual environments have also been a recurrent theme (Roberts & Parks,2001). The intersection between feminist theory and cyberculture has also created a significant corpus of work.