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she found that every time anyone started a new conference she tended to get added to it. In addition, finding that "nearly all the conferences were very male- oriented" (that is, oriented toward cars and computers), she started a conference of her own, at_home, a slightly ironic women's magazine-style discussion area; there was a fashion topic (where people discussed what brand of anorak they should be wearing) and an agony topic for people in need of emotional support.

Atack was functioning in exactly the time-honored way the Net has always worked: she wanted something, it wasn't there, she went out and built it. If women feel the Net is hostile, the answer is to build more such places, rather than waiting for someone else, probably a male-dominated technology company, to create "women- friendly" spaces and sell access to them. In fact, some women have: besides women-only resources such as the Systers mailing list for female computer professionals and the many restricted-access conferences on online services, resources such as the Women's Wire and AmazonCity are popping up on the Web to offer women the kind of assistance in making contacts and finding resources that the Net is good at.[4]

More important than the raw numbers is whether women participate proportionately once they're on the Net. My experience says they do, but the research I've seen claims that they don't and blames the difference on intrinsic, gender-specific conversational and interactive styles of the kind popularized by Deborah Tannen's book You Just Don't Understand.[5]

Susan Herring, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Arlington who has done several of the most often quoted studies of women online, writes: "My basic claim has two parts: first, that women and men have recognizably different styles in posting to the Internet, contrary to the claim that CMC [computer-mediated communication] neutralizes distinctions of gender; and second, that women and men have different communicative ethics-- that is, they value different kinds of online interactions as appropriate and desirable."[6]

Herring goes on to say that after saving and studying a year's worth of messages posted to two mailing lists, Linguist and Megabyte Union, a list dedicated to writing and computers.

The most striking sex-based disparity in academic CMC is the extent to which men participate more than women. Women constitute 36% of LINGUIST and 42% of MBU subscribers. However, they participate at a rate that is significantly lower than that corresponding to their numerical representation. Two extended discussions were analyzed from each list, one in which sexism was an issue, and the other on a broadly theoretical topic. Although the "sexism" discussions were more popular with women than discussions on other topics, women constituted only 30% of the participants in these discussions on both lists, and in the "theoretical" discussions, only 16% of the participants were women. Furthermore, the messages contributed by women are shorter, averaging a single screen or less, while those of men average one and a half times longer in the "sexism" discussions, and twice as long in the "theoretical" discussions, with some messages ten screens or more in length. Thus while a short message does not necessarily indicate the sex of the sender, a very long message invariably indicates that the sender is male.[7]

Maybe so, but who has the time to read any but the most exceptional message that's more than a screen or two in length? The value and impact of a message posted to the Net are not determined by its volume. Brevity is greatly valued on the Net, and the longer you've been online the more you appreciate it. Netizens have also observed frequently that the longest and most opinionated messages are the most likely to be LCW--Loud, Confident, and Wrong.