Through this page I seek to celebrate women's presence on the web, but also to question issues of power and gender inequality that unfortunately exist in cyberspace. When I first started researching information about Computer Mediated Communication, I felt that examining issues such as gender and differences in communication styles would be quite interesting, but instead found them to be disturbing. Through my own experiences on the web as a newbie, I have encountered online sexual harassment, in my face pornography, and difficulty being heard in newsgroups and on listservs. Actually, it is not.
Women face the same gender inequalities online as they do in face to face communication.
This is a problem that we as women have to change, for there is a whole cyberworld that can and will be available to women. In addition to doing my own exploring on the web, I have examined current literature that critically analyzes this gender inequality on-line. These writings have expanded on the reasons for the inequality by conducting research that goes beyond the simplistic and superficial conclusions. The writings dig deeper into the cause of the cyber gender gap. The basic assumption in the literature reviewed is that computer mediated communication is not gender-neutral and therefore is not conducive to equal communication opportunities.