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GENDER AND COMMUNICATION STYLES ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB
(C)Tami Sutcliffe, 1998Methodology:
[NOTE:Refer to Sites and Engines for a complete listing of all URL's used in this study.]
This study identifies the most highly visible Web pages within five given interest areas. The resultant ten sites- five representing women and five representing men-were dissected in order to examine the styles and patterns within each and also to determine which, if any, gender-related aspects of human communication have successfully migrated to Cyberspace.
SEARCH ENGINES, TOPIC SELECTION AND SITES:
SEARCH ENGINES
The intent of this study was to locate the most widely viewed English-language Web sites within certain topic areas. In order to determine which sites were most widely indexed, a variety of search engines were needed to sort the selected topics.
A listing generated from three meta-index sites (InferenceFind, Yahoo and MetCrawler) in August of 1998 yielded URLs for over 300 separate search engines. Those engines which yielded fewer than three hits in the five interest areas of this study were eliminated, as well as those which were extremely specialized, either geographically or technically. Non-English engines, those which required fees/memberships, and those related only to commercial interests were also removed from consideration. This narrowed the 300 available search engines to twenty three. Each of the twenty three engines were used to search on each topic. (See Sites and Engines for a listing of search engines URLs)
GENERAL INTEREST AREAS
Since this study was designed to collect and compare gender-specific Web sites, it was imperative to select diverse but gender-related interest areas. The areas would need to be seperated into distinctly gender-specific experiences. They would also need to avoid commercial and overtly political presentations, since the objective was to capture gender-based communication among individuals and communities, rather than gender-based communication as blatant advertising tool or promotional device. An emphasis was placed on sites created and managed by people directly related to the interest area. Any ties to organizations that might edit or influence content were avoided. This eliminated governmental, university and corporate sites.
The five general interest areas selected were:
· Medical
· Legal
· Sports/recreation
· Bereavement
· Childhood social activity
SPECIFIC TOPIC SELECTIONS
Medical topics provided the broadest spectrum of choices. Although breast cancer is one of the most widely indexed health topics on the Web, it is not limited to women. Other life-threatening cancers/diseases seem to cross gender lines and are often closely tied to medical institutions or organizations. Disease survival seemed more likely to produce fruitful ongoing communication than other more profit-oriented areas such as exercise, drug use or diet. Ovarian and prostate cancer were selected because these diseases are strictly gender-specific, the survival statistics are low for both diseases, the community of survivors of both cancers appears to be active on the Web and the powerful process of battling such a serious condition might reveal strong, unedited communication preferences.The number of personal pages devoted to these two diseases were large and survival groups appeared to be widespread.
Legal issues presented a much smaller set of choices. The sites again had to be created and maintained by people who were not influenced by formal institutitonal agendas. This eliminated all commercial sites and governmental agencies. The sites needed to have a specific gender-related subject, which eliminated general civil rights issues. Divorce was not universally divided by gender, as a topic. Legal sites related to reproductive health usually veered off into political, religious and philosophical areas that were seldom unique to either gender. Child custody issues seemed to fit this topic most closely. The topic of fathers rights in custody disputes and mothers rights in custody disputes fills the requirement of gender specificity, individually maintained pages and ongoing communication.
Surprisingly, recreational topics were one of the trickiest interest areas to compile. "Fan" sites for spectator sports are too narrowly focused on advertising and promotion to reveal any communication styles. Participatory sports were more promising, but the selected interest had to have an amateur base, be strongly supported by an online community and be reasonably accessible to both genders. Amateur hockey fit these requirements. The game is not entirely restricted to particular geographic locations, economies or age groups. Adults and children regularly participate, the amateur associations are active online and both genders are represented non-professionally.
The choice of bereavement as a topic was based on the desire to include some type of universal human experience. However, many death experiences are not viewed as gender-related in any clear-cut sense. Surviving the loss of an infant proved to be the most easily isolated topic in terms of gender-based communication. Father and mother bereavement provided a very large and active interest area, which included a variety of ages, backgrounds, and both genders.
Isolating a childhood experience which would reflect gender-based communication also seemed problematic. The interest areas had to be comparable in numbers of participants, cost of participation, widespread availability and appeal. The choice of Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts somewhat violated the preference for sites with no formal agenda, but these two organizations provided the closest thing to gender-based, non-denominational, child-centered activity currently available to examine on the Web.
The specific topics selected were:
· Medical: ovarian cancer survival and prostate cancer survival
· Legal: child custody by the mother and child custody by the father
· Sports/recreation: women's hockey and men's hockey
· Bereavement: mothers recovering from the death of an infant and fathers recovering from the death of an infant
· Childhood social activity: Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts
SITES
In order to isolate workable numbers of Web sites, some concessions to the enormity of the Internet and the World Wide Web in particular were made. Even using the filter of gender and the above topic areas to isolate and sift Web sites, a certain amount of timeliness was built into many of the selected Web sites. Sites continuously changed location, host, owner and sometimes viewpoint. As far as could be determined by this study, the selected sites were independently created. None were openly controlled, funded, supervised or edited by any over-riding institutional agenda. (The exception to this requirement were the respective Girl Scout/Boy Scout sites: the selection method of relying on the most heavily indexed sites returned the official homepages of both of these organizations, which have clearly stated agendas.)
Several large international communities are included within the final selections, but all are non-profit groups, specifically created for communicating among the members of the given interest area. Sites merely selling products, services or memberships were intentionally excluded, as the purpose was to witness individual communities of people communicating, not to merely witness corporate transactions.
The sites used in this study were accessed between August and October, 1998 and were limited to English-language servers. Each site was accessed at least three times by a variety of the twenty three search engines. Sites were sifted according to the frequency of their appearance within the search engine index. (See Sites and Engines for a complete listing of all resources)
Last Updated: March 1999
Copyright © 1999 Tami Sutcliffe
All rights reserved.
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