[Gendergap] study about gendered names and IRC

[ChaoticFluffy]

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 at 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<https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http://www.enre.umd.edu/content/rmeyer-assessing.pdf&embedded=true&chrome=true>
>
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> Gendergap mailing list
> Gendergap at lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/gendergap/attachments/20111214/b9bcabf9/attachment-0001.htm