I have been thinking a lot lately about how the author of anything on the internet is presumed to be male.  People have even referred to my articles here as having been written by a "he," even though they are on feminist issues, and my author's name is clearly female.  (In many languages, even!)

This is annoying as hell, particularly when you start noticing it everywhere.  However, I do think that we ourselves are partly to blame for this. And for the larger perception that the internet is a boyzone, even though men are the minority of internet users.

I think this partly stems from the use of androgynous usernames online.  Which has two sources: women who want to be anonymous (i.e. not pestered or stalked), and women who are forced to choose crappy usernames, as often happens in large systems like AOL.  (Is "mo3481_9" a man or a woman?  Who knows!  And these crappy usernames tend to propagate across a user's online life.  If you are sending email as mo3481_9@yahoo.com you are inclined to sign up on a small forum as username "mo3481_9" even though there are plenty of usernames available there.)

In the absence of gender identification, the societal default is to assume male.  If you run across a forum post by mo3481_9 most people will refer to that person as "he."  This is partly because we don't have a good pronoun for "gender neutral" or "gender unknown."  Although "s/he" comes close, because it at least looks like a regular word.  It's completely unpronounceable, but less clunky than "his/her" or the ungrammatical use of "them" and "their."

This in turn creates a blind spot in everyone's vision.  If you assume that every gender neutral internet handle is male, then it's going to look like at least 80% of the internet is boys.  This problem is compounded by our tendency to seek out our own gender - men tend to read blogs by men, and women tend to read blogs by women.  I would be hard pressed to name ten male bloggers off the top of my head.  And I remember how startled I was when I heard of the existence of sports blogs.  (Blogs?  For sports?  Really?  But… why?)

I can certainly understand why a woman would use a gender neutral username on the internet.  It can feel like a refuge, to be able to interact with people as a shadowy figure, to shed the assumptions and prejudices that can make life as a woman so difficult.  But the truth is that people aren't treating you as gender neutral when you do this.  They're treating you as a man.  Kind of a creepy feeling, right?  Totally understandable, but kind of creepy nevertheless.

I switched to using clearly female usernames many years ago, and I would never go back.  For one thing, I found that the harassment I imagined was just not as prevalent as I thought it would be.  It also made me feel like I was stepping out of the shadows, and proudly representing my gender in public.  I think it's important that people see how many women are online, participating in forums, creating content, leaving comments, and making the internet tick.