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...

-Fluffernutter

On Wed, Dec 14, 2011 at 2:05 AM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I just read the following paper which describes an interesting study
that was conducted regarding IRC:
http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf

The researchers created several IRC bots with different names - some
female, some male, and some ambiguous. They put the bots in several high
traffic IRC channels, and had them record all the private messages they
received. The bots themselves were completely silent.

The bots with male names received an average of 3.7 private messages per
days that were sexually explicit or threatening. The bots with ambiguous
names received an average of 24.9 such messages per day. The bots with
female names received an average of 100 such messages per day!

This is a very sad statistic, and probably goes a long way towards
explaining why there aren't that many women on IRC these days.

On a happier note, if you want to hang out on IRC and not get sexually
harassed, you can always join #wikimedia-gendergap!

Ryan Kaldari

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