Summer 98

Joan Korenman’s work is widely known and acclaimed by women online, particularly for her Women’s Studies Mailing list (WMST-L) and her University of Maryland Web site - (see Page 10 in this issue of Women’space) . Now she has put together her online work with her offline achievements. It makes for a great combination.

Article

“Women and Girls Last: Females and the Internet”
by Janet Morahan-Martin

Need a detailed set of arguments why we should ensure women and girls are included in the new technologies? Want to have a large range of references which support those arguments? All this, without the woman blaming, can be found in a paper written by Janet Morahan-Martin at
sosig.ac.uk/iriss/papers/paper55.htm
[no longer accessible at this address]

Starting from “Low Internet use by females not only gives them less access to information and services available online, but also can have negative economic and educational consequences.” this paper goes on to elaborate some of the barriers to Internet access and use for women and girls. Morahan-Martin points out that while the number of women online has increased dramatically, the data is often contradictory and that we still depend on estimates. What we all know for sure is that women are still in the minority online, stay online for less time and that young white males are online the most. “Boys spend more time on the computer at home than do girls, and parents buy twice as much computer-related products for sons than daughters”. She shows that computer games are much more oriented to boys in both content and sales. Her summaries and discussion of surveys of online discussion groups show that men and women communicate differently, and in ways that support earlier work on male domination of communication in many mixed groups. She points out that “A commercial study of what women want online found that women want their own communities” and goes on to urge that future research on the Internet include the impact of gender and culture.

This paper is, as you will have noticed in the URL, number 55. It’s the one which stands out for me, in the online collection of some really fascinating papers from a Social Science conference in March 1998 in Bristol, UK.
www.sosig.ac.uk/iriss/

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