CMC Magazine November 1, 1995 / Page 13
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From scomjw@pegasus.hud.ac.uk Fri Sep 29 05:42:36 1995 Date: 29 Sep 1995 10:40:33 +0000 Subject: Your article in June's CMC Mag To: john@december.com I'm just catching up on some of my online reading-- Camille Shandor's article about online sexism being one. I just wanted to state that I agree with most of what she says. The following are some comments, both general and specific, that I would like to make. Please feel free to post this to any discussion group to which it may prove relevant. More often than not I feel I'm beating the proverbial head against a brick wall being in many mixed-sex discussion fora but, for the time being, I flatly refuse to subscribe to women-only groups. This is not through some perceived view of mine that to join such a group would admit 'defeat' in some way, but that such groups are often without a precise focus so, in my opinion, end up being simply a bunch of women from very different backgrounds, with very different interests, carping on about how men exclude them from everything and hunting around for possible solutions. This may be a horrible generalisation - nevertheless, it is my perception of such groups. Having read a lot of Susan Herring's work I feel the least I can do as one woman is to keep plugging away at actively participating in mixed-sex discussion lists. I have implemented the odd subtle strategy to stir up comments. On one such occasion I disguised my sex when making my first posting to a list. This proved quite simple: my email address was set upCMC Magazine welcomes letters on subjects relating to this magazine's contents or computer-mediated communication in general. Send email to john@december.com.; I cancelled my usual signature; ended the message with my nickname and, being a linguist, carefully phrased my comments to be short, sharp, quite positive, critical of the person to whom I was responding and not a smiley face in sight! Plenty of healthy discussion ensued. Surprisingly enough, several male respondents to my posting replied to me privately and we entered lengthy discussions. I followed this up with another posting - usual email address/signature - with my full name and my usual 'wordy' style of writing, throwing in a smiley for the sheer hell of it. There were 3 other contributions in that digest - all from men - and they received a tremendous response. Not a bean for me. It can be argued that perhaps my first posting was worth the response it received and the second was totally unworthy. However, I would argue that the difference was too great. Eventually I came clean on the list, posting both sets of comments in the same message and inviting the numerous respondents to the first to be equally honest and admit whether they would have been so keen to reply to my remarks had they known they had been written by a woman. It was refreshing to note how many did own up to being biased towards male comments, including some women subscribers. The main outcome of this little exercise is that this particular discussion group now has more women subscribers actively participating in the list - an increase of some 22% so the list-owner tells me - with significantly more notice being taken of these contributions. My point is this: if women choose to group together to seek some security in their own sex or discuss hot topics amongst themselves in private then that's their prerogative. However, I would call on more women to chip away at this male bastion that is CMC now. Hope this too provokes some dicussion. Cheers Julie ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Julie Wilkinson, HCI Research Centre School of Computing & Mathematics, University of Huddersfield Canalside, HUDDERSFIELD HD1 3DH, UK Tel: +44 (0)1484 472895 Fax: +44 (0)1484 421106 Email: -----------------------------------------------------------------------
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