Breaking Away from Grounded Identity? Women Academics on the Web

Abstract

The World Wide Web has provided a new way for academics to find out about others' work and to present versions of their identity. In previous discussions we analyzed how people present themselves in this new medium, in terms of Goffman's ideas of the presentation of self, and commented on gender differences and how issues of credibility and authority are handled by women academics in their homepages. This paper reports discussions with women academics about how they have responded to this opportunity, both in how they present themselves in their own pages, and how they deal with the problems involved in presenting an individual identity within an institutional Web page framework. In presenting themselves in personal homepages, many women academics feel a need to establish their credentials and entitlement to an academic identity. However, the vulnerability of themselves as women remains part of their persona as academics. For example, they were ambivalent about the use of a self-photo on their homepages (most wanted to avoid it, but found it friendly and validating on other women's pages). The discussion considers how far new technology provides opportunities for new forms of identity, or how far the identity presented on the Web is still grounded in people's physical and institutional existence. Women academics feel that the Web has given them new freedom and reduces some traditional gender and status differences (as has been found with other aspects of electronic communication), but they are still wary of it being "yet another way of carrying on the same old gender plot."