Constructing Gender in Chat Groups

Abstract

We investigated the construction of gender in chat groups. Four unacquainted persons chatted in two gender-anonymous conditions and a non-anonymous control condition. In one anonymous condition, the gender focus was made salient. The other groups did not know about the gender focus. All participants had to guess the gender of the others and give reasons for their decisions. Results suggest that (a) overall, 2/3 of gender guesses fit the sex category of the targets, (b) gender anonymity was more comfortable for women, (c) participants used mostly gender-stereotypic cues to infer gender, however, men and women used syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic cues (with different predictive value) to different degrees, (d) conversational behavior varied depending on gender anonymity, and (e) degree of gender salience was irrelevant for the use of gender as an organizing category.

What Research Has to Say About Gender-Linked Differences in CMC and Does Elementary School Children’s E-mail Use Fit This Picture?

“…Both Koch et al (2005) and report an absence of gender-linked differences for task or person-orientedness. The experiments reported in Thomson et al are special in that they assume, on the one hand, that there is such a thing as a gender-linked preference for topic of communication, and, on the other hand, that this can be strongly affected by alignment.…”

Chats, Tweets and SMS in the SoNaR Corpus: Social Media Collection

“…Reference [9] recruited 62 participants, mainly from the incoming first semester psychology students at the executive university, who held group discussions using ICQ computer chat in different conditions. A similar method was used by [1] to collect a Dutch chat corpus, called ChatIG, who collected chats from 114 secondary school students using the Blackboard Collaboration Tool (a digital learning environment system).…”

“…All tweets, chats and SMS were processed and incorporated in the appropriate part of the SoNaR corpus. All data is stored in the FoLiA format 9 , a xml- 8 Due to stricter security rules in the design of Apple software, building a similar App for iPhones proved to be much more complicated. Exporting the SMS messages from an iPhone is only possible after connecting it to a computer.…”

“…Exporting the SMS messages from an iPhone is only possible after connecting it to a computer. 9 format developed especially for linguistic resources. Every data file is accompanied by a metadata file in CMDI format 10 .…”

“…SoNaR ( [9], [11]) is a major reference corpus of written Dutch collected by a cooperation of several linguistic research groups in the Netherlands and Flanders. The corpus was finished 1 March 2012 and contains 500 million words from a variety of text sources, e.g.…”