Feminism's final frontier: cyberspace.

Abstract

Feminist teachers often look to computer-mediated communication as a solution to the gender inequities of the classroom. This paper discusses the difficulties encountered by feminist teachers in a computer medium. Specific suggestions are made regarding ways to improve computer-mediated instruction for female students and to encourage active participation by women in the technology decisions affecting us all.

**********

In the past few years, the number of classes being held in computer labs has grown tremendously. Many feminist teachers have moved into the computer classroom with high hopes about what cyberspace can offer their students. We, too, began teaching our classes in the computer lab in 1992, partly because we had read many of the studies which discussed the benefits the computer could provide female students[l]. We had read the studies by Spitzer in 1989, Cooper and Selfe in 1990 and Johnson-Eilola in 1997 that delineated the psychological filtering effect that occurs in computer mediated communication. Gender, ethnicity, verbal fluidity, physical appearance and other "distracting" visual cues disappear in computer mediated communication, providing a more equal learning environment. This, in turn, encourages a wider range of participation in discussions, allowing a voice to more women who often feel silenced in the classroom. We were also aware that women traditionally speak less than men in most situations and particularly in a traditional classroom environment (Rich, 1979, and Spender, 1980) and that they are interrupted more often when trying to communicate their ideas (Zimmerman & West, 1975). Even worse, these tendencies are compounded for women of color. Although several studies acknowledged that on electronic discussion lists men still average more messages and more words than women (Wolfe, 1999; Ebben & Kramarae, 1993; Kramarae & Taylor, 1993; Selfe & Meyer, 1991), in general, studies supported the idea that gender differences disappeared online, including the domination of conversations by men (Light, Colbourn & Light, 1997; Steeples, et al, 1996). Therefore, we hoped that women would have a more active role on-line than in face-to-face encounters. We hoped that within the computer classroom, we could provide a safe cybercommunity where our students would be more likely to discuss ideas from the courses, share their own writing, comment on other students' writing, and actively engage in knowledge construction.

At the same time, we hoped to use the computer classroom to help decenter the authority of the teacher and make for a more democratic learning experience. Many teachers who have incorporated computer mediated communication into their classrooms remark on the unique decentering of authority that occurs, the shift from a focus on the teacher to a focus on students (Civello, 1999; Sullivan & Pratt, 1996; Cooper & Selfe, 1990; Belcher, 1999; and Selfe and Wahlstrom, 1989). The ratio of student to teacher discourse in computer mediated classrooms rises dramatically (Bump, 1990; Faigley, 1990; Kreemers, 1990; Rickly, 1999). Students feel free to participate in their own way in the discussion, allowing participants time to think and compose if they wish or spontaneously jump into the conversation. Multiple students can speak at once without waiting to be called on by the teacher. In fact, Hartman et al. concluded that teachers in computer mediated classrooms interacted more often with their students than teachers in the traditional classroom (1991). The direction of these interactions is also more likely to be controlled by the students and thus encourages the students to disagree with the instructor and one another (Cooper & Selfe, 1990; Faigley, 1992; Hawisher & Selfe, 1992; Selfe, 1992). Women, who tend to be reluctant to disagree with others in traditional conversation mediums, initiate disagreements as often as men in computer-mediated discussions (Wolfe, 1999). As students begin to see their peers in the computer classroom as an audience, their work begins to be "aimed less at producing writing that the teacher supposedly wants and more at negotiating meaning among colleagues" (Langston & Batson, 1990, p. 152). Thus, the computer classroom promised a method of encouraging female students to find a voice in an open, enfranchising, and egalitarian space. Dominant students could no longer monopolize the conversation since electronic discussion produces a parallel interaction of many speakers at one time.

In addition, we hoped the open exchange would encourage a learning community to develop, one based on a relatively anonymous space in which everyone could choose what to reveal about her identity. Through the computer classroom, students would begin to build a community that would provide a foundation for envisioning themselves as part of the academic community and its often alienating discourse.

We, like many cyberfeminists, felt that the new technologies would give women a chance to start afresh, create new languages, programs, images, and fluid identities, that cyberspace would offer women an opportunity, as one cybergrrll cite says, "to be anything you want to be." Yet it is important to recognize that cyberspace exists within a social framework, which is still deeply sexist and racist. Computers do not automatically obliterate hierarchies, blur gender, and produce class free communities.

After only one short semester in a computer classroom, the realities of cyberspace became clear. In contrast to our initial optimism, we quickly found the claim of a gender-free equality in cyberspace problematic. Like Selfe and Meyer (1991), we found that males dominated the interactions on the computer, both under normal circumstances and when participants were anonymous. More importantly, men and women brought their genders on-line. In other words, they displayed communication features of culturally-learned gender styles in their typed messages. Numerous studies have shown that in on-line discussions men use more aggressive styles (Herring, 1993; Ebben & Kramarae, 1994)--posting longer messages, beginning and ending discussions, asserting opinions as facts, and being confrontational and adversarial (Sutton, 1994). In contrast, women tended to qualify and justify their assertions, apologize, express support for others, and cooperate with others. While men flamed [2] participants often times targeting women, women reacted by falling silent and refusing to contribute again (Herring, 1993). In practice, writers in cyberspace give off gender cues an average of once every 3-4 lines of text (Herring, 1998b), despite attempting to remain gender neutral.

Even more disturbing is how often women's responses are ignored. In our own classrooms, women received a third of the responses that men received. Almost every female student remarked about this phenomenon at the end of the class, perceiving the lack of responses as "devaluing me" and "pretending I don't exist." A young Hispanic woman described the silence after she sent a remark to the list as being "an erasure of my self." She felt that when she asserted her opinion strongly, she was ignored, but if she apologized for her thoughts, she received either flames or encouragement sent off the list. In addition, female students still accounted for less of the total number of contributions to the discussion list. In our classrooms, 65% of the contributions were by male students. Female students began many of the discussions but dropped out after the discussion became controversial or after being flamed. After one heated discussion, an older woman expressed her discomfort with the "rudeness of the other students" who she felt were trying to "win the discussion instead of learn from other students." Recent studies by Taylor et al. show that men dominate the discussion on usenet groups even when the topics are women's issues (1993). Gladys We found that on the newsgroup Alt.feminism, 83% of the contributions were from males, and on the Soc.women newsgroup, 78% of the responses were male (p. 4). Both of these groups were obviously devoted to women's issues, yet female participants were more reticent than their male peers.

Multiple studies have begun to examine the type of language utilized by men and women online to determine what might influence the differences in participation by gender. S. C. Herring (1993) distinguished a set of characteristics conventionally identified as female or male language, and used these categories to analyze the postings on the academic discussion list LINGUIST. Some of the features associated with female language were "attenuated assertions," "apologies," "personal orientation," and "questions" while the male language features included "strong assertions," "self-promotion," "authoritative orientation," and "rhetorical questions" (p. 7). When Herring examined the postings of both male and female participants, she found that women utilized a mixture of male and female language features at least 46% of the time while men used the mixed style only 14% of the time. She concluded that "women ... must employ some features of 'men's language' in order to be taken seriously as academics, and some features of 'women's language' in order not to be considered unpleasant or aggressive" (p. 8). A similar pattern was found in our own classrooms. Women did offer more questions and support fellow students more often than their male peers did. One Hispanic woman insisted on personalizing her postings to the discussion list for the class. She began by inserting conversational entries, such as "have a good day" and "keep up the good work." Later, she started each posting addressed to a particular individual in the class, encouraging the student to comment more often on the list or responding to the student's questions or even reminding the student that she is a valued member of the class. Her postings blended the personal and the academic, directing the conversation in a more personal orientation and defusing the challenging, authoritative orientation of many of the male postings. When this particular female student posted frequently and thus controlled the tone of the list, more female students posted comments. When she began to write less after several male students complained that her comments were often off topic and therefore inappropriate, the female participation in general decreased dramatically. Thus, the evidence suggests that women may participate less often online than their male peers because of the way their communication styles conflict with the unwritten rules of computer-mediated communication. Laurie Fink debunks the myth that cyberspace is a "cultureless and egalitarian meeting place" (1996, p.2) instead arguing that because computer technologies are "situated in networks of material and cultural practices, institutions, and economies" they "replicate all of the inequities and hierarchies that currently plague academia and the larger world of which it is a part" (p. 2). Thus, we had to become aware that gender still affected the classroom even if the classroom was a virtual space.

Other factors also became gendered in our computer classrooms. Women in our classes were invariably more inexperienced with computers than their male counterparts. This is not surprising given that much experience comes from playing computer games--75% of which are designed for boys (Pereira, 1994). Most of us can easily conjure up the images of scantily clad women, body parks blown away by weapons, and dying characters that abound in such games. Why is this important? Because for many people, computer games are the beginning teachers of computer skills. Therefore, when women come in our writing classes, the exposure we give them to the computer may be not only the first but also one of the most defining. Finally, many researchers have found that women are more often asked in classrooms using computers to do rote learning, to type, or to passively browse the web while men are taught advanced applications like web authoring which enables them to "participate in the writing and creating of the World Wide Web." Women are less involved with technology at every level of the educational system. At the highest level, "87% of all doctorates in computer science go to men ... and 97% of all tenured" computer science faculty are male (Finke, p. 2). Women are involved more with computers in secretarial and data entry positions, encouraging them to be viewers not active participants engaging the technology for their own use. Manuel Castells, a Spanish sociologist, argues that the world is progressively being divided into

   two essentially distinct populations: the interacting and the
   interacted, meaning those who are able to select their
   multidirectional circuits of communication, and those who are
   provided with a restricted number of prepackaged choices. And who
   is what [is] largely determined by class, race, gender, and country.
   (1996, p. 371)

If this continues, vast numbers of women will be able to browse the electronic world but not choose their own paths or create the new communities, languages, and identities cyberfeminists know are so important to the future. Women have access to computers at a rate only slightly less than men, yet the disparity shows up not only in how women use the technology but also in how many women with access to computers actually use them. A study at Georgia Tech found that "male internet users outnumbered female by a ratio of 9 to 1" (Finke, p. 3). As feminist teachers, we were concerned that our female students would continue to underutilize the technology available and become part of the large number of people in the underclass that is interacted upon by technology, those who are pawns targeted as easy consumers for the technology markets. We hoped to avoid what Paulo Freire calls the "banking model" of education that allows the instructor to be the only dispenser of knowledge who deposits information into the minds of the students. Computer classrooms were supposed to help us provide more interaction with the material for our students. It became obvious that new ways of approaching the use of the technology in the classroom would be necessary in order to ensure that female students left the classroom not just computer literate but able to interact with the information that technology makes available and with the structures that organize and present that material to the computer user.

Female students also often complained about the physical structure of the computer. While we had envisioned students building strong communities through the computer and participating in the freeing environment of a virtual interaction, many of our female students complained about the isolation they felt behind the computer screen. One young woman explained, "Everyone's so focused on the computer screen, you could drop dead in the chair next to them and they wouldn't notice." The orderly rows of computers in our labs either facing forward toward a non-existent teacher or in a square surrounding an open area, or one sometimes filled with printers intimidated our students. Our female students would often move their chairs to crowd around one computer, talking animatedly; they would compose aloud together while one person became typist. Students in completely on-line classes would frequently suggest a face-to-face meeting of our virtual community, coming from rural areas some distance away to "get to know their classmates." In many ways, our female students tried to personalize the computer classroom and make it more an interactive environment not a classroom where students remained isolated in front of a computer. The computer became a tool used in the group interaction not in place of group interaction. As teacher, we had to rethink how assignments should be structured so that personal interaction worked together with the computer technology. Students needed to access information on the computer, bring it back to the group, discuss it, reshape it, and recreate it on a document on the computer again.

So what should a feminist teacher do to ensure that the use of computer technology is a positive experience for female students? First, we must recognize the benefits of the much more obviously socially constructed gendered space. Once students are aware of ways gender is constructed on-line, gender morphing can become a pedagogical asset. For composition teachers and psychology teachers, gender morphing and other identity morphing can help students understand subject positions and receptions by others who are unfamiliar due to class, race, age or gender. In literature classes, morphing can let students take on the identities of characters or authors, helping the student come to a better understanding of a text. Sharing with students transcripts from chat sessions or MOOs brings the issue of gender neutral language into the open and makes what often appears to be just an "overly sensitive feminists'" complaint, an important, practical issue.

There are also strategies we can use in our classes that will encourage women to take an active role in technological learning. Studies have shown that female students participate more in online classrooms in which the teacher controls the interaction, regardless of the teacher's gender (Herring & Nix, 1997). What many women describe is a sense of freedom from interruption, harassment, and flaming. In this way, the idea of a self-regulating environment on-line actually works against women, producing not equitable participation but control and participation by the most aggressive individuals. Thus, the teacher should give specific netiquette rules as well as provide rules for ensuring everyone is responded to on list serves and in synchronous sessions. The usual unwritten rules of the discussion list have to be altered to allow for personal interaction and responses. In our own classrooms, off-topic discussions were encouraged and limits for appropriate responses were expanded. At first, many of the male students were frustrated by what they saw as "time wasting chatter," but eventually, most students appreciated the openness of the forum. On the end of the class evaluations, a male student commented that the discussion list had "provided surprising information that added to my overall understanding of the material in the class." As the discussion list rules were reshaped, more female students participated, so that by the end of the course, female students were providing almost 42% of the postings to the list.

Finally, perhaps the most important pedagogical implication of recent research is that we, as feminists teachers, must provide activities that encourage our students to become interactive learners engaged not only in reading texts provided by the teacher but also in creating documents for the web, questioning assumptions about technology, critically reading the web, and experimenting with the possibilities of hypertext, synchronous and asynchrounous communication. In the end, there is space in cyberspace for feminist teachers, but perhaps not the space we had envisioned.

Endnotes

[1] A version of the material in the first few pages of this paper was published in an earlier article discussing the use of computers with minority students. See Tayebi, K., Moore-Jazayeri, M., & Maynard, T. (2001). Discovering diverse voices: Electronic discussion lists in the multicultural composition classroom. The ACE Journal, 3(2), 7-29.

[2] When a user sends insults to another user on the computer, it is referred to as "flaming."

References

Belcher, D. (1999). Authentic interaction in a virtual classroom: leveling the playing field in a graduate seminar. Computers and Composition, 16, 253-267.

Bump, J. (1990). Radical changes in class discussion using networked computers. Computers and the Humanities, 24, 49-65.

Castells, Manuel. (1996). The Rise of the Network Society. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Civello, C. (1999). "'Move over, please": The decentralization of the teacher in the computer-based classroom. English Journal, 88, 89-94.

Cooper, M. M., &Selfe, C. L. (1990). Computer conferences and learning: Authority, resistance, and internally persuasive discourse. College English, 52, 847-869.

Ebben, M., & Kramarae, C. (1993). Women and information technologies: Creating a cyberspace of our own. In H. J. Taylor, C. Kramarae, & M. Ebben (Eds.), Women, information technology, and scholarship (pp. 15-27). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Faigley, L. (1990). Subverting the electronic notebook: Teaching writing using networked computers. In D. A. Daiker & M. Morenberg (Eds), The writing teacher as researcher: Essays in the theory and practice of class-based research (pp. 290-311). Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann Boynton/Cook.

Finke, L. Women lost in Cyberspace? (Online) Available: http://enhanced-learning.org/prox/paper5.htm

Hartman, K., Neuwirth, C.M., Kiesler, S., Sproull, L., Cochran, C., Palmquist, M., & Zubrow, D. (1991). Patterns of social interaction and learning to write. Written Communication, 8, 79-113.

Hawisher, G. E., & Selfe, C. L. (1992, Summer). Voices in college classrooms: The dynamics of electronic discussion. The Quarterly, 14, 24-28.

Hawisher, G. E., & Sullivan, Pl (1998). Women on the networks: Searching for e-spaces of their own. In S. C. Jarratt & L. Worsham (Eds.), Feminism and composition studies: In other words (pp. 172-197). New York: MLA.

Herring, Susan C. (1993). Gender and democracy in computer-mediated communication. Electronic Journal of Communication [Online], 3(2). Available: http://www.cios.org/getfile/HERRING_V3N293

Herring, Susan C. 1998b. Virtual gender performances. Talk presented at Texas A&M University, September 25.

Herring, Susan C. and Carole Nix. 1997. Is "serious chat" an oxymoron? Academic vs. social uses of Interact Relay Chat. Paper presented at the American Association of Applied Linguistics, Orlando, FL, March 11.

Johnson-Eilola, J. (1997). Nostalgic angels: Rearticulating hypertext writing. Norwood, N J: Ablex.

Kramarae, C., & Taylor, H. H. (1993). Women and men on electronic networks. In H. J. Taylor, C. Kramarae, & M. Ebben (Eds.), Women, information technology, and scholarship (pp. 52-61). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Kramarae, C., & Treichler, P. (1990). Power relationships in the classroom. In S. Gabriel & I. Smithson (Eds.), Gender in the classroom: Power and pedagogy (pp. 41-59). Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Kreemers, M. (1990). Sharing authority on a synchronous network: The case for riding the beast. Computers and Composition, 7, 33-44.

Langston, M. D., & Batson, T. W. (1990). The social shifts invited by working collaboratively on computer networks: The ENFI Project. In C. Handa (Ed.) Computers and Community: Teaching Composition in the 21st Century (pp. 141-159). Portsmouth, NH: Boyton/Cook.

Light, Pl, Colbourn, Cl, & Light, V. (1997). Computer-mediated tutorial support for conventional university courses. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 13,228-235.

Pereira, Joseph. March 16, 1994. A toy for men; video games help boys get a head start. Wall Street Journal: B1. Rich, A. (1979). On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-78. New York: Norton.

Rickly, R. (1999). The gender gap in computers and composition research: Must boys be boys? Computers and Composition, 16, 121-140.

Selfe, C. (1992). Technology as a catalyst for educational reform in English classes: Computer-supported writer's conferences. In M. Secor & D. Charney (Eds.), Constructing rhetorical education (pp. 625). Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Selfe, C., & Wahlstrom, B. J. (1989). Computer-supported writing classes: Lessons for teachers. In C. Selfe, D. Rodrigues, and W. Oates (Eds.), Computers in English and language arts: The challenge of teacher education (pp. 257-268). Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Selfe, C. L., & Meyer, P. (1991). Testing claims for online conferences. Written Communication, 8, 163-192.

Spitzer, M. (1989). Computer conferencing: An emerging technology. In G. Hawisher & C. Selfe (Eds.), Critical perspectives on computers and composition instruction (pp. 187-200). New York: Teachers College.

Spender, D. (1980). Man Made Language. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Steeples, C., Unsworth, C., Bryson, M., Goodyear, P., Riding, P., Fowell, S., Levy, P., & Duffy, C. (1996). Technological support for teaching and learning: computer-mediated communications in Higher Education. Computers and Education, 26, 71-80.

Sullivan, N., & Pratt, E. (1996). A comparative study of two ESL writing environments: a computer-assisted classroom and a traditional oral classroom. System, 29, 491-501.

Sutton, L. (1994). Gender, Power, and silencing in electronic discourse on USENET. Proceedings of the 20th Berkeley Linguistics Society, UC Berkeley.

We, Gladys. Cross-Gender Communication in Cyber-Space. Electronic Journal of Virtual Culture (Online), 2(3). Available: ftp byrd.mu.wvnet.edu/pub/ejvc

Wolfe, J. (1999). Why do women feel ignored? Gender differences in computer-mediated classroom interactions. Computers and Composition, 16(1), 153-166.

Zimmerman, D. H., & West, C. (1975). Sex roles, interruptions and silences n conversation. In B. Thorne & N. Henley (Eds.), Language and sex: Difference and dominance (pp. 105-129). Rowley, MA: Newberry House Publishers.

Kandi Tayebi, Sam Houston State University

Judy A. Johnson, University of Houston--Victoria

Tayebi, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of English and publishes on computers and writing, Romantic and environmental literature, and Johnson, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of School Psychology and publishes on writing disabilities, planning strategies and computers.