Gender Bias in the Cyber World

Although the general population is used to the common feminist argument that females worldwide are discriminated against, many don’t know how deep this discrimination goes- specifically including within the cyber world. This genre of female discrimination within the cyber world is called a micro aggression. Even though the label “micro” makes the problem sound like a small issue, the title may fool you because it is not so small of a problem. According to the article How the Cult of Internet Openness Enables Misogyny by Astra Taylor, misogyny is rampant in cyber culture.

If one thinks about the typical gamer, programmer, or techie, what do you imagine? The answer is most likely a male. The saddest part about this answer is that it’s actually true. According to Astra Taylor, “evidence suggests that as few as 1.5 percent of open source programmers are women.” That leaves a staggering 98.5 percent to determine how the entire cyber world works and performs. This number should be alarming considering the amount of women online is almost even to the amount of men that are present. When the Internet was created, it was known and praised for it’s “openness” and gave people hope that it would be the medium to bridge the gap between all races and genders; however Taylor’s article questions this fairness and openness the Internet had once brought hope for.

Even when women do end up getting into the programming industry, Taylor states that they have an astonishing large attrition rate of 56 percent- double the rate of men. Women in this “brogrammer” industry feel as though they are constantly being undermined and as though their suggestions aren’t taken seriously, so when this toxic behavior doesn’t stop, these equally as qualified women leave. If women are not allowed to feel safe and respected within the companies that create the skeleton of the Internet, then it is hard to expect the contents of the Internet to be any different.

The disproportion of female programmers is not the only problem we see within the cyber world; misogyny of the outside or “real” world has seeped into the Internet, and discrimination against women online has become a norm that most users tend to mindlessly scroll over. There have been multiple accounts of women being harassed and bullied online. According to the Pew Research Center, 25 percent of females who use the Internet are sexually harassed, compared to the 13 percent of men; 26 percent of females who use the Internet are stalked, compared to the 7 percent of men; and 18 percent of females who use the Internet sustained harassment, compared to the 16 percent of men. We can see this data in action through the example of one female activist, Mary Beard. Beard was trying to get more females on the British bank notes and as a result received “online death threats and menaces of sexual assault” merely for appearing on a television show to discuss her campaign. This is not an uncommon occurrence, as Adria Richard, the woman who revealed what is known as the Donglegate scandal, can attest to. Richards posted a picture of two men who were making crude sexual jokes at an open-source conference onto Twitter and as a result, she experienced the misogyny of the cyber world first-hand. Immediately after she posted the information about these men on the medium that is hailed for being “open”, she received an influx of death and rape threats from male users online.

Instances such as these only teach women that our thoughts and opinions are not wanted and can even be dangerous to express. This type of misogyny is dangerous to free speech because if women do not feel safe to post and share their ideas on the most used medium of our day, then we can find ourselves sliding down the slippery slope to a complete biased form of information. According to Taylor, already only 20 percent of science bloggers are women. This means that the majority of people posting scientific facts and articles are men. What happens if women continue to feel unsafe from misogynist men who are waiting to verbally attack their next victim? Many great works and ideas could be suppressed and never come to fruition.

Women have begun to increasingly speak out about this harassment and its negative effects; however, the tables are being turned right back onto themselves. Once the victims of abuse speak out, the harassers then try to accuse victims of trying to stifle free speech on the Internet. The men that make this argument do indeed have a right to write and share as they would like online, but free speech does not include threatening others. This kind of argument is incredibly ironic considering, as I mentioned before, that the prospect of being potentially harassed online by males might already be stifling the free speech of women around the world.

If such intimidating males don’t claim that activist women are stifling free speech, then according to Taylor, they will make the claim that the women speaking up just need “to “lighten up” and that the harassment no mater how stressful and upsetting isn’t real because it’s only happening online, that it’s just “harmless locker room talk”.” This kind of justification of unjust and threatening behavior appears to be the cyber equivalent of the kind of misogyny that women encounter with sexual harassment crimes in the real world. In Taylor’s article, she references a young, female political columnist, Laurie Penny, who has personally experienced such harassment online. Penny’s wrote an e-book called Cybersexism that argues how women’s opinions online are equivalent to that of the illogical “short skirt” argument when men try to place blame on the victims within rape culture. “Having one and flaunting it is somehow asking an amorphous mass of almost-entirely male keyboard-bashers to tell you how they’d like to rape, kill, and urinate on you,” explained Penny. This explanation of sexism in the cyber world is spot on because as we can see from facts and observation, apparently a female merely having an opinion online is enough reason to harass her. Trying to justify online harassment is very similar to how women are taught to cover up because men have “urges” rather than teaching men that rape is inherently bad. Instead of teaching men that treating women this way online is bad and should not be tolerated, the men are telling women who complain of harassment that they must “lighten up”, or argue that these women should have known they would receive harassment because sharing their beliefs was “asking for it.”

Even if women end up being brave enough to enter the cyber world, the misogynistic bias makes it more likely for women to hide the fact that they are women at all. In Taylor’s article, she references a study done by the University of Maryland about female usernames in the cyber sphere. Taylor states, “Those posting with female usernames, researchers were shocked to discover, received 25 times as many malicious messages as those whose designations were masculine or ambiguous.” This shows a direct correlation to a female prejudice in the cyber world. These findings were so shocking that the authors suggested that parents urge their daughters find gender neutral usernames. However, the suggestion to cover up who you are to stay safe only supports Penny’s analogy that women’s opinions are like “short skirts.” This suggestion stems off of how the general population tries to deal with rape culture and gives girls the idea from a young age that men simply cannot control their “urges” to not harass and therefore to avoid harassment you must give up part of your own identity.

Whether or not this “male cult” can be changed by the general public however, is questionable because reform starts from within. This means that if more women break into this “brogrammer” world and make the gender gap smaller, the online world could potentially become a bit more respectful of females. More equality within the companies that structure the cyber world could possibly lead to more equality online in general. However, it is the big time investors that have the biggest say in at least how their companies will stock their employment and Taylor explains that, “more than 85% of venture capitalists are men generally looking to invest in other men.” This means that the chance that more women are brought into the programming and cyber world is slim. However, maybe if enough people vouch for equality reform within the technology industry, then enough stamina can build behind the movement. Women should not have to feel scared online nor should feel discriminated against. Most importantly women should not stoop to believe that “that’s just the way it is” online because that merely is claiming that men have the right to harass women online. There is no simple solution to the misogyny online, but humans are constantly evolving and pushing reform. As Taylor says, “[Technological systems] are made by human beings and can always be changed and improved.”