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+--- Thread: Institutional Sexism Digital Suffragists: Women, the Web, and the Future of Democracy (2021) (/showthread.php?tid=1325)
Digital Suffragists: Women, the Web, and the Future of Democracy (2021) - Clover - Jun 25 2025
I found this book at a library, and I was initially so excited when I read the title. I was hoping for a book that would talk about how in the new digital age women utilized the internet to progress feminist causes, or how the internet shaped new feminist movements. I was also hoping for maybe something that could provide advice on how to build online feminist communities.
Well, it turns out the book wasn't really about those kinds of things. It was more of just like "did you know the internet is really sexist?!" So I was kind of disappointed in that regard. Like, as a millennial, I grew up on the misogynistic internet, so a lot of that wasn't really a surprise to me. (Although, a lot of Gail Dines' Pornland was not a surprise to me either, as a young woman who grew up with extreme online pornography, but I would say Pornland was more of an interesting read. So I guess something must be missing from this book to make it intriguing even for someone who grew up with the content the book is describing.)
Taking the book at its face value, it's alright. I don't really know if I'd recommend it, unless you like learning more facts and statistics about the lack of representation women have in Internet comments, software applications, etc. The book takes a strange twist in chapter 6 where it suddenly starts teaching the user about software development practices/concepts like "Agile" and "scrum" and "MVP" and seems to claim they create sexist software, which I found kind of bizarre as someone who works as a software developer...
One group mentioned/referenced quite a bit was the Women's Media Center. https://womensmediacenter.com/
There were some observations collected about the differences in how men and women communicate and interact online. Some observations I found notable were that women prefer to communicate in groups where they can find similarities or in smaller groups with more trusted people they knew; that women tend to stop participating if they don't get responses; and that women are more risk-averse when it comes to using unintuitive software.
Gender-woowoo-o-meter: Moderate. Author defines "misogyny" as something that affects "women and gender non-conforming people"... ma'am please... The book also mentions "deadnaming" as a type of "online abuse", and claims that the sex binary is outdated for collecting data. Overall though, the instances of gender woowoo can be glossed over—the book mainly focuses on women.