by amelia on
Jun 27, 2008 at 8:24 pm
A new study from Northwestern University scholars Eszter Hargittai and Gina Walejko suggests that “men are more likely to share their creative work online than women despite the fact that women and men engage in creative activities at essentially equal rates.”
This new research found that nearly two-thirds of men reported posting their work online, while only about half of the women in the study reported doing so.
“Because sharing information on the Internet today is a form of participating in public culture and contributing to public discourse, that tells us men’s voices are being disproportionately heard,” says Eszter Hargittai, assistant professor of communication studies at Northwestern University.
When co-authors Hargittai and Walejko controlled for ’self-reported digital literacy’ and ‘Web know-how,’ they found that men and women were posting their material at equal rates.
“This suggests that the Internet is not an equal playing field for men and women since those with more online abilities — whether perceived or actual — are more likely to contribute online content,” says Hargittai.
Read more.
by amelia on
May 27, 2008 at 10:51 am
A recent story in the Boston Globe addresses the persistent absence of women in fields such as science and engineering. The significant gender gap in these careers is often blamed on science and math classes in schools, apparent differences in aptitude, as well as potentially sexist companies. Although women make up nearly half of those participating in the paid labor market, they hold only a small proportion of careers requiring high-qualifications and receiving high earnings. Women make up only 20% of our country’s engineers, less than 30% of chemists, and only about 25% of those specializing in computing and mathematics.
The Globe reports:
“Over the past decade and more, scores of conferences, studies, and government hearings have been directed at understanding the gap. It has stayed in the media spotlight thanks in part to the high-profile misstep of then-Harvard president Larry Summers, whose loose comment at a Harvard conference on the topic in 2005 ultimately cost him his job.”
“Now two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling conclusion: An important part of the explanation for the gender gap, they are finding, are the preferences of women themselves. When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else.”
“One study of information-technology workers found that women’s own preferences are the single most important factor in that field’s dramatic gender imbalance. Another study followed 5,000 mathematically gifted students and found that qualified women are significantly more likely to avoid physics and the other ‘hard’ sciences in favor of work in medicine and biosciences.”
Read more.
by amelia on
May 14, 2008 at 12:48 pm
Well-know sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh of Columbia University has written for Slate Magazine on Grand Theft Auto 4. Venkatesh’s article “Unjustifiable Carnage, Easy Alliances, and Lots of Self-Doubt: What Grand Theft Auto IV Gets Right About Gangland and Illegal Economies” draws connections between ‘Liberty City,’ the setting of the game, and Chicago’s South Side.
Venkatesh writes,
“If you are a fan of the new Grand Theft Auto video game, I have just the neighborhood for you. The setting of GTA IV, Liberty City, is an amped-up version of the New York metro area. If you want a slice of the real thing, however, I’d recommend Chicago’s South Side. The last time I visited Chicago, I stopped by 59th Street, near Washington Park (and only a few short blocks from the picturesque University of Chicago). Two of the local gangs were fighting each other in full view for control of a prime sales spot, a hotel. For a monthly fee, the proprietor had promised to allow one gang to turn the place into a bordello—drugs, prostitution, stolen merchandise. For the gangs, winning meant more than simply getting rid of their enemy. Neither controlled the area surrounding the hotel. Anyone bringing drugs (or women, or guns, etc.) to the hotel would have to run the gantlet formed by other enemy gangs, who would be at the ready to shoot down the transporter.”
by amelia on
Apr 23, 2008 at 9:29 pm
Mike Nizza, author of the New York Times blog The Lede, recently reported on a new study from physicist Cesar Hidalgo of the University of Notre Dame and Calros Rodriguez-Sickert from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile on the persistence of relationships within the cell phone network.
Hidalgo and Rodriguez-Sickert used data from almost two million people and eight million phone calls over the course of the year. They found that the leading cause of a persistent relationship was reciprocity - one friend returning another’s call.
PhysOrg.com interviewed Hidalgo:
“‘One result that I thought was somehow not so intuitive was the trade-off between the degree (number of links) of a person and the persistence of its ties,’ Hidalgo told PhysOrg.com. ‘It has been known for a long time that some people are much more connected than others, yet it was not known whether these highly connected individuals also had a larger number of strong connections. While time constraints may force people with more ties to be less persistent on average, the data also showed that, in absolute terms, people with more ties also have a greater number of persistent ties than those less connected. Highly connected individuals are not trading quality for quantity; rather, they appear to be more socially expressed in both the numbers of links and the persistence or strength of them.’”
by amelia on
Feb 19, 2008 at 3:28 pm
A new report from the Crimes Against Children Center at the University of New Hampshire debunks previous stereotypes about internet sex offenders as “adults who target young children by posing as another youth, luring children to meetings, and then abducting or forcibly raping them” according to the APA. Instead, the authors of the study suggest that “most online sex offenders are adults who target teens and seduce victims into sexual relationships. They take time to develop the trust and confidence of victims, so that the youth see these relationships as romances or sexual adventures.”
Sociologist and lead author Janis Wolak argues, “most Internet-initiated sex crimes involve adult men who are open about their interest in sex. The offenders use instant messages, e-mail and chat rooms to meet and develop intimate relationships with their victims. In most of the cases, the victims are aware that they are talking online with adults. A majority of the offenders are charged with crimes such as statutory rape, that involve non-forcible sexual activity with adolescent victims who are too young to consent to sexual intercourse with adults.”
by jon on
Feb 16, 2008 at 9:43 am
Discussions about inequality and access to the internet are one thing, but if you look only at people who already have access, are there differences in online behavior? Eszter Hargittai found that race, ethnicity and education level predict whether young people are more likely to use the social networking site MySpace or its competitor Facebook.
TechCrunch points to a study by Hitwise (a marketing company that tracks internet usage) that suggests class, geography and other factors shape whether people use Google or Yahoo! as their search engine of choice:
They include “lifestyle” indicators like “Urban Essence,” “American Diversity” and “Small-town Contentment” that I’m not sure how to react to, and of course, as a private consulting company, it’s not like they’re giving their data away here for social scientists to scrutinize. (Though I admittedly have no idea what it would take to get the data…I got impatient with their website very quickly!) Nonetheless, pretty interesting.
