Girls take the lead in online content creation but the same old gender roles are still at work. Illustration by Adam Strange for the New York Times. Not that Adam Strange.
The New York Times hails girls as the new “cyber-pioneers,” displacing the stereotypical pasty, geeky male.
The paper draws that conclusion from a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which found that a lot more girls aged 12 to 17 are blogging than boys — 35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys — and are creating or working on their own Web sites (32 percent of girls versus 22 percent of boys).
What’s more, girls online also outnumber boys in building or working on other people’s Web sites and creating profiles on social networking sites (70 percent of girls 15-17 have one, compared to 57 percent of boys 15-17). The only area in which more boys are active than girls is posting online videos.
This is all good news, right? Could this finally signal the end of the gender imbalance in technology? So it would seem, if you believe the Times. But not so fast.
If you look closely at the Pew data you’ll find the activities girls are engaged in online are not the ones that our traditional pasty-faced boy geeks submerge themselves in. Boy geeks are doing the same old stuff they’ve always done — gaming, programming, hacking, building their own computers, etc. There’s little in the Pew study to show more girls are doing any of that than before.
Online girls are primarily content creators; we’re not seeing any more of them moving in the direction of technology development. Boys still rule the roost there, it appears. And that situation isn’t getting any better.
The Times notes that in 2006, girls made up fewer than 15 percent of those taking the AP computer science exam, and the number of incoming undergraduate women choosing to major in computer science declined by 70 percent from 2000 to 2005. So perhaps not so much has really changed, despite the newspaper’s headline.
It turns out that girls probably churn out so much content because it’s an extension of the same old socialization that portrays them as objects.
“Girls are trained to make stories about themselves,” said Pat Gill, the interim director for the Institute for Communications Research and an associate professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
From a young age they learn that they are objects, Professor Gill said, so they learn how to describe themselves. Historically, girls and women have been expected to be social, communal and skilled in decorative arts.
“This would be called the feminization of the Internet,” she said.
The Times story, titled “Sorry, Boys, This is Our Domain,” implies that girls’ online activities are something boys want to intrude upon. Sorry, but as the Magic 8 Ball says, All Signs Point to No.
Not much has changed in Genderville despite all the newfangled technology. Boys, it turns out, post more videos because they’re show-offs trying to impress others, and girls, whose content creation is fueled by the need for self-expression, turn bitchy when their work is appropriated by others — the equivalent of copying one another’s prom dresses (the Times’ analogy, not mine, btw). Anybody shocked?
Download the Report
Download the report, Teens and Social Media (in PDF) from the Web site of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
