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 <rkald...@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@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/gendergap >
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