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Herring's results contradict studies carried out by Lee Sproull and Sara Kiesler. In their book Connections, a study of the use of electronic communications in networked organizations, they conclude:

Because it is harder to read status cues in electronic messages than it is in other forms of communication, high-status people do not dominate the discussion in electronic groups as much as they do in face-to-face groups. For instance, when groups of executives met face-to-face, the men in the groups were five times as likely as the women to make the first decision proposal. When those same groups met via computer, the women made the first proposal as often as the men did.[8]

Other women report personal experiences that back up Sproull and Kiesler's research. "Usenet, while it can be nasty, acerbic, uncaring and unsympathetic, is truly a nondiscriminatory society," writes Judy Anderson, who styles herself yduJ ("rhymes with fudge") on Usenet.[9] "It judges you only through your postings, not by what you look like, your marital status, whether you have a disability, or any of the other things that are traditionally used for discrimination."

"On the Internet you are only what you choose to reveal," consultant Frances Bell wrote in an email message to the editor of London's Independent newspaper protesting an article about Internet hostility. "People contact me because of what I do and how I do it. Now I may be politically naive, but I thought this was the goal of the ideal workplace: an environment where people of whatever gender are sought- after because of what they do regardless of disability, physical attractiveness or age.[10]

But the image of women confidently striding the Net is not the one projected in the mainstream media. Instead, we get articles like Newsweek's 1994 cover story "Men, Women, and Computers,[11] which characterized the Net as essentially hostile to women and filled with aggressive, obnoxious, sexually predatory men who like playing with computers and exploring, as opposed to practical, beleaguered women who "just want their computers to work." I have news: that's what everybody wants, man or woman. It's because they don't "just work" that it's necessary for us to waste brain cells on the knowledge that our home PC is a clock-doubled 486SX/25 with 16Mb of RAM and almost no free hard disk space so we can explain this to the technical support guy when we can't get our mysteriously silent sound cards to squawk unpleasantly. Not having to know this kind of thing would certainly free up some useful mental space for more valuable information, as Macintosh users around the world are only too happy to remind us with religious fervor.

Much of the scientific evidence purporting to show that women and men are intrinsically different has been challenged, notably in psychologist Carol Tavris's The Mismeasure of Woman. "Are women really kinder, gentler, and more interconnected with people and the environment than men are?" she writes skeptically. "Are the qualities of peacefulness and connection to others endemic to female nature, or are they a result of the nurturing, caretaking work that women do because of their social and family roles? For that matter, are these qualities truly more characteristic of women than men, or are they merely human archetypes-- stereotypes of female and male--that blur when we look more closely at actual human beings?[12]

Tavris's conclusion is especially interesting for those studying gender interactions on the Net: "Just as when in Rome most people do as Romans do, the behavior of women and men depends as much on the gender they are interacting with than on anything intrinsic about the gender they are.[13]In other words, the difference between men and women online may not be determined by their own gender but by the gender they believe their correspondents are. By this theory, if both women and men believe that the online world is largely male, their behavior may warp accordingly. This makes sense to me, especially since I have trouble with most research that purports to find intrinsic differences between men and women: I always find my behavior a closer match to the supposedly male portion of the