Yes, you’re right, because surely no woman would ever comment under a male or non-gendered pseudonym. Such a thing has never been heard of on the Internet.

Anyway, the point isn’t the gender of the commenters – the point is “do female posters attract more dismissive comments than male ones” and the evidence so far, from the only person who’s actually bothered to do any research, is “no, they don’t”. Though, as EH has helpfully pointed out, there’s no way of actually proving or disproving it either way, so this whole thing is a waste of time.

One difference between this thread and the next is that the other thread isn’t about an online lottery for tickets to the Michael Jackson memorial service. Another likely potential difference is that the sexist internet commenters drawn to this thread don’t know how to click over to the other thread and leave sexist comments there, but I don’t know how to establish that as a fact.

If not, it seems like the rhetoric glossed over countless personal situations that could prevent a person from attending, lack of internet access being only one of them – and it’s probably the easiest obstacle to overcome.

I dunno, I think it’s a reasonable to ask why people haven’t drawn attention to the plight of poor people in, say, Oklahoma who, because of their lack of internet access, missed a chance to register for a lottery in which they would have faced 100-1 odds to win tickets to a Tuesday morning memorial service in Los Angeles CA.

Um, did tickets to the memorial include free transportation? From anywhere?

If not, it seems like the rhetoric glossed over countless personal situations that could prevent a person from attending, lack of internet access being only one of them – and it’s probably the easiest obstacle to overcome.

If you want an example of my taking seriously comments by those who disagree with me or criticize my writing, head on over to my next post and read the comments there. The overall tone of that thread is very different. People engaged with the material and shared their thoughts on it. I then engaged with their comments and responded in kind.

Certain things I haven’t taken on in this thread, because I thought others did a great job, in some cases better than I would have done. A case in point is Salient regarding the gender topic on this thread. Salient’s offered what I think are some very helpful points in explaining the issues.

Yes, and denying a poor black couple a car loan because neither partner has sufficiently satisfactory job security to guarantee repayment isn’t racist. I agree.

But as I’ve said, many times now, individually rational actions can result in systematically disproportionate outcomes.

And, unlike the car loan analogy, there’s absolutely no “cost” to CT commenters second-guessing themselves if they’re feeling the need to dismissively challenge a post’s right to exist, and rephrasing or rethinking that choice.

It is true that it can be quite difficult to prove that sexism exists. But if I needed to highlight a pattern of sexism, I would make use of attacks on Sonia Sotomayor’s intelligence before I brought up attacks on Sarah Palin’s intelligence, if you know what I mean.

On the other hand, you were the one who took an informal poll based on the presumed gender of different participants, in a comment thread to a post about differential accesses to the Internet. Salient mentioned the gender only of the OPers. If there are no female names in the discussion, this is evidence that there are no women participating, I think, and evidence that the behavior that does appear is perpetrated by males.

And there are two reasons that I jumped on the assertion that there was: first, you accused me of being part of it, which offended me; and second, I think that spreading the myth that there is such a trend will be very bad for the general tone of debate. Female commenters won’t want to comment, because they’ll be afraid of being denigrated by men. Female posters will ignore legitimate criticism, because they’ll just dismiss it as sexism – exactly as you and EH did above – or they simply won’t post at all. Well-meaning male commenters won’t want to criticise posts by women, for exactly that reason.

To be clearer than I was: I don’t think it’s gender motivated for anybody.

My point was something more like, “Actions that seem individually rational, on the aggregate, are producing a negative result, which seems to disproportionately occur on posts by female authors.”

mpowell, I think (based on the last paragraph of your post) you get exactly what I’ve been clumsily trying to say about the aggregate effect. For anyone who’s not sure, I’ll try an analogy:

It’s kind of like housing loans. A group of banks may offer or decline loans to people in such a way that each individual decision, like each individual comment, is rational and justified. But the net effect of this behavior can be very problematic, even when each individually rational action seems sensible and perfectly justifiable.

I think there is not a clear line between criticizing the content of the post and challenging the post’s right to exist. I am more or less aware of EH’s work in studying internet usage habits, much of which I find interesting, but I’m not convinced it makes sense for researchers to flag this digital divide as a social justice to be remedied. And the vacuousness of the particular example (although perfectly valid in terms of examining the claim presented!) underlines my point. So in some sense I’m criticizing the post’s existence because I don’t think that this line of research has produced results that suggest any action. But you could go back to the thread’s on Cohen and rescuing justice from Rawls, and I was similarly critical, especially initially, along with many other commenters about the significance or value of Cohen’s inquiry. I really don’t think its gender motivated, at least for me.

I am open to arguments about whether the digital divide is something that should be rectified as a tool to reduce social inequality or whether there are far better levers to reduce social inequality that will eventually close the digital divide. Right now I come down for the latter. But even given that, I am still interested in posts that document this digital divide and discuss its sources and its manifestation. I left my comment as a way of observing that I didn’t feel that this was the kind of evidence that led to a policy-actionable level of concern. But maybe that’s not entirely appropriate. If there is a tendency for female posters to draw more hostile, dismissive comments, I’ll make an effort to be more cognizant of the overall tone my posts are contributing to create and leave more space for discussion of the issue at hand before jumping immediately to a concluding view.

(Of the six posts I reviewed, the only comment suggesting that the post shouldn’t be up was the dismissive “Eszter, the data you link to is only a one-month comparison and looks noisy” from John Quiggin.)