Managing gender in online spaces: Gender role flexibility and women's Internet job searches.

摘要

As internet technologies increasingly pervade Americans' daily lives, scholars, businesspeople, and educators point to their importance in work, school, and home. Concerns about disparities in physical access to these technologies have ceded space to concerns about disparities in other kinds of access, including cognitive, cultural, social, and educational. Concerns about gender differences in access give rise to the question, What is the relationship between gender and different contexts of information-seeking on the internet? Laboratory search exercises with 90 women internet users and twenty interviews provide insight into gender differences in one of the most wide-spread uses of this technology: looking for a job. The search exercises and interviews suggest that women's abilities to employ flexible performance of gender roles can improve job search outcomes.;Participants used the commercial job-search service Monster.com to look for three types of jobs: a typically feminine, a typically masculine, and a gender neutral one. Analysis of clickstream data and questionnaires suggest that high Gender Role Flexibility (GRF) does not improve search outcomes overall, but instead certain outcomes are more likely to be affected than others. In a search for a feminine job, Gender Role Flexibility influences women's comfort with the process and their assessment of the quality of jobs found. In a search for a masculine job, however, both flexibility and the interaction between GRF and internet experience influence the number of jobs women found. At the highest levels of internet experience, flexibility has no influence, while at lower levels of experience, it can improve the number of jobs women find and their comfort with the search task. Like other cognitive influences on internet activities, GRF seems to be most important among new, less skilled, or infrequent users.;As online career search engines grow in popularity and complexity, technological search interfaces and individual search skills become an increasingly important filter that separates those who gain the most and those who gain the least from their experiences. The gendered nature of occupations and of internet technologies suggests that gender roles play an important part in the benefits women derive from available information systems. For women with a flexible notion of gender roles and their performance, the masculine nature of the internet can be more manageable, less exclusive, and more accessible.