Communicative style and gender differences in computer-mediated communications

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This chapter reports on an experiment that explored how gender interacts with communicative style to affect decisions to participate in computer-mediated communications (e.g., Usenet newsgroups). Although some field studies indicate that style has a differential effect on men and women, the data fails to confirm this hypothesis. However, significant differences were found in interest in topics, as well as effects of style across all subjects, which have implications for the design of future studies on this topic.