Gender Gap on the Internet ANGELO HICKS

Claim The internet aids in increasing the inequality gap between genders.

Early Days In the early days of the internet, it was mostly populated by males. This was because mostly tech-savvy people had access to the internet. It wasn’t until a few years after that access to the Internet became widespread.

Anonymity and Trends Having an anonymous identity on the Internet provides a breeding ground for people to voice controversial opinions and say what is actually on their mind without consequence. This video provides proof that sexism exists on the Internet. It does this by testing Google’s autocomplete feature, googling phrases like “women should” or “women need to”.

Video Games In many games, men will create female characters and pretend to be females in order to get different treatment from other player. This can even go as far as getting free items, sometimes of high value. Female gamers used to be a rare sight which led to the creation of a parody of the acronym MMORPG (which actually stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. M ostly M en O nline R ole P laying G irls

Journalism: Gamergate Gamergate is an incident where female game developer Zoe Quinn created an interactive game called “Depression Quest”. The game received many positive reviews from game critics but reviews from the players were overwhelmingly negative. As a result, Quinn received multiple forms of harassment from hate mail to death threats claiming that she got undeserved praise for the game because of the fact that she was a female.

Social Settings  Online Chatrooms In the early days of the Internet, chatting with strangers online was one of the main draws. Chatrooms often started off with questions like “a/s/l?” which stands for “Age/Sex/Location?” Often times if users didn’t respond that they were female, the chat would end because males didn’t want to talk to other males.

Disclaimer  Mature content is discussed on the next slide. View at your own will.

That’s Weird: Pornography Since access to the Internet went public, the production and distribution of pornography has seen and significant increase. Feminists argue that pornography goes against the beliefs and platforms of feminism. One of their main points are that women lose value as human beings because they are reduced to subordinate sex objects for men. An example of this would be on-face ejaculation.