Digital Suffragists
Women, the Web, and the Future of Democracy
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- 15,99 €
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- 15,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Why women’s voices are outnumbered online and what we can do about it, by a New York Times comment moderator.
If you’ve read the comments posted by readers of online news sites, you may have noticed the absence of women’s voices. Men are by far the most prolific commenters on politics and public affairs. When women do comment, they are often attacked or dismissed more than men are. In fact, the comment forums on news sites replicate conditions of the offline and social media worlds, where women are routinely interrupted, threatened, demeaned, and called wrong, unruly, disgusting, and out of place. In Digital Suffragists, Marie Tessier—a veteran journalist and a New York Times comment moderator for more than a decade—investigates why women’s voices are outnumbered online and what we can do about it.
The suffragists of the early twentieth century were jailed for trying to vote. Can a twenty-first century democracy be functional when half of the population is not fully represented in a primary form of political communication? Tessier shows that for online comments, it’s a design problem: the linear blog comment formula was based on deeply gender-biased assumptions. Technologies designed with a broad range of end users in mind, she points out, are more successful and beneficial than those that reflect the designer’s own habits of mind. Tessier outlines benchmarks for a more democratic media, all of which stem from one fundamental idea: media must adopt gender and racial representation as key performance indicators. Equal speaking time for women is a measure of democracy.
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In this deeply researched if narrowly focused study, Tessier draws on her experience as a comment moderator for the New York Times to document "how women's voices are derailed and disrupted online." She cites a 2015 study showing that women were outnumbered three to one in news comments at the Times and other news websites, and connects this disparity to the underrepresentation of women in Congress and on public affairs TV programs; the overlooking of women's voices and needs in the development of new technologies such as the Apple Health app, which didn't include a period tracker in its first iteration; and the disproportionate amount of online harassment women receive. Tessier calls on institutions and businesses to "buil diverse workforces that reflect a variety of life experiences ," and documents how Stanford University's Gendered Innovations program and other initiatives are helping to create user interfaces that appeal to women's values and interests, which include social connections, safety, and "give-and-take conversations with other people in their communities." Unfortunately, Tessier's analysis does not take age and class differences into account, and she doesn't examine her own assumption that commenting in the New York Times is a worthy goal in and of itself. Still, this a lucid and well-informed look at implicit biases in the digital world and the harms they cause.