08: Participation on E-mail List by Gender and Social Purpose

Discussion

Overall, the gender breakdown of e-mail list participation corroborates previous studies showing male domination of both computer-mediated communication (CMC) and face-to-face (f2f) forums (e.g., Hall 1996). These results parallel those of electronic forums, like newsgroups or other mailing lists, where participation is strictly voluntary -- as opposed to classroom uses of CMC, where participation may be required as part of the coursework and gender participation is often much more egalitarian.

• Men posted 65% (805 of 1244) of all the messages for the year, despite the fact that 48 of 92 residents (over 50%) were women.
  
• Men dominated critical dialogue by an even higher margin, posting 74% (272 of 369) of the messages in this category while constituting 59% (29 of 51) of the participants in critical dialogue.