Genderinemailbasedco-operativeproblemsolving.docVIP

Gender in email based co-operative problem solving Greg Michaelson* Margit Pohl** * author for correspondence Department of Computing Electrical Engineering Heriot-Watt University Riccarton EH14 4AS Scotland phone: +44 131 451 3422 FAX: +44 131 451 3431 email: greg@cee.hw.ac.uk ** Institut für Gestaltungs- und Wirkungsforschung Technische Universit?t Wien Favoritenstr. 9 A-1040 Wien Austria phone: +43 1 58801 18753 FAX: +43 1 58801 18793 email: margit@igw.tuwien.ac.at Margit Pohl studied Computer Science and Psychology in Vienna. Currently she works at the University of Technology Vienna. Her main areas of interest are hypertext, educational software, Human Computer Interaction and gender studies. Greg Michaelson teaches Computer Science at Heriot-Watt University near Edinburgh. His research interests include the design and implementation of functional languages, parallel functional programming, and gender in Information Technology. INTRODUCTION In the 1970s and 1980s, the question whether there are gender differences in face-to-face communication played an important role in feminist discussions. A considerable number of studies (for an overview see e.g.: Tr?mel-Pl?tz 1984, Gr??el 1991, Tannen 1991) showed conclusively that such gender differences exist. In particular: men talk more than women; men tend to interrupt women more often; women encourage and support each other’s topics more often than men. It is an open question whether similar phenomena can be observed in email communication. The study described here tries to clarify this issue. In feminist literature the effects of email on gender differences in communication is still controversial. On the one hand, many women apparently have had fairly negative experiences on the Internet. Sexual harassment on the net produces a climate which does not encourage women to use the Internet (Spender 1995, Brail 1996). Furthermore, the rules of politeness governing face-to-face communication seem to be less binding