Last week Jonathan texted me that he “would really love to see more women using our comments section.”
Little did he know that men and women communicating is something I, for decades, have spent a lot of time thinking about. It probably started with that 1981 Gloria Steinem piece, Men and Women Talking, and continued with the excellent 1990 book by linguist Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.
It’s a fascinating topic to me. The wrinkle of internet message boards is that most people comment anonymously, so you don’t know their sex. The structure of a Zoom call changes things too, profoundly, especially in terms of interruption.
My short answer to Jonathan was that more women than he thinks do already comment to BikePortland. Women, like men, can and do pick anonymous, gender-neutral user names. The deeper question for me is, why do we assume that everyone is a man?
And I mean the “we.” Just a couple days ago, an occasional commenter posted on one of our stories. “Oh good, so-and-so posted, I like his comments,” thought I. Meanwhile, I had also just received an email from this person in my home email account—nothing to do with BikePortland. I know this person, she is a woman! But it took me a day before I realized the woman in my email box was the same person in the BikePortland comments, despite the fact that her gender-neutral username was practically the same.
How does this happen?
I think many people expect a female commenter to fit into a certain voice, or trope. If you don’t fit into that, the assumption is that you are a man. The molds are “I as a woman experienced xyz;” the face of the cause/disease; the victim; the newbie in need of advice.
In the case of BikePortland, the email address that commenters sign in with identifies some people as women despite their gender-neutral, outward-facing identity. We’ve featured comments from women as Comment of the Week. Did you notice?
It’s still true, though, that BikePortland gets many more comments from men than women. But why assume that is something that needs to be fixed? Why is the male behavior considered the norm? We have five to ten commenters (all men I’m pretty sure) who write a lot, maybe even more than I do. Read them or not, agree with them or not, I appreciate that several of them write link-rich posts which can be informative. I think of them as BikePortland’s Greek chorus—a chorus which doesn’t sing together or agree with each other, but there they are.
So some percentage of men think the world needs to hear from them a lot. Fewer women are like that. (Did you know that hens can crow? Great big cock-a-doodle-dos as good as a rooster? I nearly fell off my tree stump when I heard that come out of a non-aggressive hen who apparently needed to establish dominance over a new bird I had just introduced into the flock.)
Anecdotally, my perception is that most of the women who comment on BikePortland do it precisely, when there is something they specifically can add to the discussion. Comments from women tend to be few, focused and on-topic.
I agree with Jonathan, though, it would be nice if we had more comments from women.
