Toward the Feminization of the Net?
In many traditional ways, women's and men's behavior on the Web mirrors their behavior in consuming other forms of media, in performing everyday chores, and in enjoying leisure time. Just as women and men tend to watch different television shows, read different sections of the newspaper, and purchase different types of magazines and books, they also gravitate to the online activities that resemble the media products they like.
What do the Pew data tell us? First, they reveal that gender parity, at least in terms of access to the internet, has been achieved (although a digital divide in access for lower income women is cause for concern). This is reason for optimism. However, more disconcerting is what the Pew data tell us about how women and men differ in their use of the internet. There are tensions in gender differences, whereby women are using the internet to reinforce their private lives and men are using the internet more for engaging in the public sphere. Women are avid users of e-mail, often for the purpose of connecting with family and friends. This use is similar to how women adapted the telephone as a social and domestic utility, and this also replicates what other studies have told us. When men use e-mail, they are less inveterate users, at least so far as informal and familial sociability is concerned.
Women's information-seeking behavior tends toward health or medical information; again casting women's internet use into a care-giving mode.
Women
I tend to go online for religious or spiritual information (again possibly falling into the "warmer and fuzzier" role of mothers/caregivers). In contrast, the favorite.
Web activities of men include seeking news and financial information, selling and buying stocks, looking for information on their hobbies, seeking political information, and checking out sports information. Thus, men's internet use falls into activities that tend to reside in the public sphere.
Although these data are based on telephone surveys and subtleties in internet use (e.g., multitasking while using the Web in the home might not be revealed), the premise of gendered use is disturbing. Women are not using the internet for the purpose of civic participation. The internet has been promoted as a way in which to increase social capital, but women apparently are not using it for this purpose.
However, this void could be merely a limitation of the Pew studies. Acknowledging that gender is a complex and contested concept, one must ask whether the quantitatively driven Pew data provide an accurate portrayal of gender online. Van Zoonen (2002) argued for a mutual shaping of gender and technology where "social meanings of the internet will emerge from particular contexts and practices of usage". Because Pew data are reliant on telephone surveys, there is no way in which to ascertain the gendered nuances of the internet in everyday domestic life. Thus, ethnographic studies examining the use and negotiation of the internet in domestic spaces could yield some rich and surprising aspects of gender use and negotiation.
One must also be cautious of generalizing and essentializing the category of "women." Many women and women's groups have been actively using the internet as a way in which to produce and consume feminist communication. Use of the internet by the global women's movement as a method of facilitating policy-oriented activism is quite vital (Shade, 2002), and this is particularly the case with initiatives to ameliorate the digital divide for women in developing countries. One such example is provided by the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW), which has hosted a virtual seminar exploring the use of ICTs for women in terms of empowerment and disempowerment, the "neutrality" of ICTs, the digital divide, and social capabilities.
What is clear is how the internet has been increasingly feminized. Web content has been designed and created for a particular audience of women-middle to upper class white women. This includes portals adapting a magazine-type format featuring health, beauty, cooking, parenting, and shopping tips; "interactive" discussion forums; quizzes; and e-commerce ventures (e.g., clothes, makeup, toys). An example of this is iVillage.com, whose partners include America Online, Clairol, Milano Cookies, Dewey Color System, and Maternity Mall. Other examples abound; Handbag.com, Oxygen.com, and Women.com are just a few of these types of portal sites. The internet is also becoming feminized via the design of multimedia products where ideas about the female gender are incorporated into the process (Spilker & Sorenson, 2000) as well as through the design of internet appliances that feature e-mail and calendaring devices that have been developed and marketed as a specific female consumer item.2 Pew data also reveal that American women are ethnically diverse and that their Web use differs. One example is Asian American women. Pew data reveal that they are more likely than other women to go online to listen to music and to seek out sports information and financial information. But are the various interests of these women being met (or courted) by portals? Or, is there an erasure of race? One can argue that there is. As Nakamura (2002) contends, "Gender and race can just as easily be co-opted by the e-marketplace. Commercial sites such as these tend to view women and minorities primarily as potential markets for advertisers and merchants rather than as 'coalitions'". "Cybertyping," Nakamura also argued, is apparent in the deployment of internet services such as broadband, resulting in the redlining of neighborhoods not considered affluent enough for micro- and psychodemographic marketing.