Netiquette rules tend to authorize insults and criticisms as proper, so long as one allows one's adversary an equal and opposite blow. Some netiquette rules also prohibit polite language. Most often, however, women's posts are answered with dead air, silence. Women's attempts to initiate new threads get significantly fewer responses than threads started by men, Herring's and other's studies have borne out. The answers they do get are shorter and their threads die more quickly than do male-initiated threads.
Women can fight back, however.
Linguists have found that when women contribute more than 30 percent of a conversation, analog or digital, they are perceived as dominating the floor. Whether you think the Internet is the perfect model for the future of cyberspace or a poor model, it's well on the way to becoming the default model. Professor Susan Herring has two papers on sexism on the net due to be published in upcoming books by the University of California at Berkeley's Linguistic Society and by SUNY Press in Albany, New York. For the past few weeks I have been trying to breath life into a similar document. What is needed here in Australia is a code of practice or ethics for sysops and sysadmins.