Gender Performances Online

Herring, S. C., & Martinson, A. (2004). Assessing gender authenticity in computer-mediated language use: Evidence from an identity game. Journal of Language and Social Psychology,23, 424–446.

Assessing Gender Authenticity in Computer-Mediated Language Use : Evidence From an Identity Game


In the study Assessing Gender Authenticity in Computer-Mediated Language Use : Evidence From an Identity Game, the authors Susan C. Herring and Anna Martinson, analyze how gender is represented by digital writers and how gender is perceived by readers online. Using The Turing Game, a publicly available chat environment that supports spontaneous, synchronous text chat for the purpose of “To Tell the Truth”-style identity games; the most popular of which are games about gender identity. In these gender identity games, users attempt to deceptively represent themselves as a gender opposite their own and judges attempt to guess the users’ correct gender, using only the tools of language allowed in the purely text based environment. The Turing Game can be found at the http://www.cc.gatech.edu/elc/turing/info2_5.html).

Using publicly available data from the site, the researchers analyzed the game logs, judges' ratings and debriefing chats to ascertain the users’ attempted gender performance, the judges’ assessment of authenticity of the gender performance and the users’ actual genders. Through a content analysis of this data, following research questions were considered:

• How do contestants in gender identity games present themselves? Are there differences between real-life males and real-life females, between same-sex or cross sex performances, and/or between male and female identity games?

• What aspect(s) of contestants’ self-presentation do judges attend when assessing gender authenticity? Which aspects are most important in judges’ decisions?

• How successful are contestants’ self-presentation strategies? How successful are the judges’ assessment strategies in terms of their respective goals?

The game logs revealed that contestants “produce stereotypical content when attempting to pass as the opposite gender, as well as giving off stylistic cues to their real life gender (Herring and Martinson 2004).” In turn, the judges based their assessments of gender on responses to stereotypically gendered questions as the primary strategy to assess gender, leading most often to them incorrectly guessing the users’ genders. This finding is in opposition to previous evidence that people assess gender online based solely on linguistic style. Stylistic features such as message length and word choice often reflected the users’ true gender, aligning with previous studies that concluded that writing styles are often highly gendered. The study concludes that “conventionally gendered ways of communicating are deeply embedded in people’s social identities, and that differences tend to persist even in conscious attempts to manipulate gendered language, regardless of whether others attend to them (Herring and Martinson 2004).”

As a resource to scholars studying digital writing and identity, I would recommend this article as a secondary or tertiary resource, but not a primary. Although I found the research questions well considered, I felt that the methodology used of analyzing data only from the site, limited the ability to ascertain how people assess gender. I feel that triangulation in methods would be beneficial here. I would have liked to see interviews with the judges, allowing them to elaborate on the factors that influenced their attempts to guess a users’ gender.