As early as 1993, well before the proliferation of the web, Sandra Herring investigated differences between men and women in their use of language in asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) such as bulletin boards, newsgroups, and discussion lists. Barely 15 years later, research on gender and the internet has burgeoned. The online sphere, with its mixture of information, entertainment, and communication modalities and its convergence of audiovisual technologies requires multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological lines of inquiry. Psychologists, for instance, often examine gender differences in the online behavior of women and men; anthropologists and sociologists regularly investigate how women build communities on the internet; feminist political scientists tend to look at the way women use it to mobilize for social and political causes;

cultural studies scholars have a recurring interest in the virtual performance of gendered identities in, for instance, online games; and sociolinguists mostly discuss gendered language patterns in various online contexts. Given this plethora of approaches, any attempt to write about this subject is bound to be incomplete and partial. Nevertheless, we organize our account around what we see as the key conceptual contours of the social science literature in this area.