09a: Perceived Usefulness of E-mail List vs. Other Media by Social Purpose (By Gender)

09b: Actual Use of E-mail List by Women and Men According to Social Purpose

DISCUSSION

Looking in more detail (than 08) at participation by gender, and looking at the actual participation in the context of men's and women's perceptions about the e-mail list, we can conclude the following:

• (09a) Women found the e-mail list more useful than men did for social dialogue (2.30 vs. 2.04), while men found the e-mail list significantly more useful than women did for critical dialogue (2.30 vs. 1.75). Women and men found the list about equally useful for housekeeping purposes (2.49, 2.39).
  
• (09b) Perhaps not surprisingly, these perceptions were mirrored in actual use of the e-mail list. Over 63% of women's messages were categorized as social dialogue and about 22% as critical dialogue, while 54% of men's messages were social dialogue and nearly 34% critical dialogue; about the same proportions (14.8% and 12.3%) of women's and men's messages were categorized as housekeeping.

These results somewhat corroborate studies claiming that women and men tend to use computer-mediated communication (CMC) and other communication for different purposes (such as studies cited by Herring 1996b), and also studies suggesting that women prefer a collaborative, supportive conversational style to the more competitive and combative "debate" style that often characterizes "critical dialogue" in academia and as I've defined it for this study.