Hmmm, interesting. I've often wondered whether I would have had a less pleasant experience fitting into the wiki(p|m)edia IRC channels if I had an obviously-gendered nick. As it is, I get maybe one random pm a month, if that, and most of those are of the vague "hi"-followed-by-silence sort. None that I can remember have ever been sexually explicit, though I think I might have gotten threats once or twice. Maybe one day I'll run my own little experiment and masquerade under a clearly-female name and see how that changes...<br>
<br>-Fluffernutter<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 2:05 AM, Ryan Kaldari <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rkaldari@wikimedia.org">rkaldari@wikimedia.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I just read the following paper which describes an interesting study<br>
that was conducted regarding IRC:<br>
<a title="Open with Google Docs Viewer." href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf&embedded=true&chrome=true" target="_blank">http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf</a><br>
<br>
The researchers created several IRC bots with different names - some<br>
female, some male, and some ambiguous. They put the bots in several high<br>
traffic IRC channels, and had them record all the private messages they<br>
received. The bots themselves were completely silent.<br>
<br>
The bots with male names received an average of 3.7 private messages per<br>
days that were sexually explicit or threatening. The bots with ambiguous<br>
names received an average of 24.9 such messages per day. The bots with<br>
female names received an average of 100 such messages per day!<br>
<br>
This is a very sad statistic, and probably goes a long way towards<br>
explaining why there aren't that many women on IRC these days.<br>
<br>
On a happier note, if you want to hang out on IRC and not get sexually<br>
harassed, you can always join #wikimedia-gendergap!<br>
<br>
Ryan Kaldari<br>
<br>
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</blockquote></div><br>