Gefen and Ridings, both local Philadelphia scholars, begin by recapping women's and men's sociolinguistic patterns of discourse as prior discussed in the literature. They hypothesize that women, more than men, will wish to both receive support from and give support to a virtual community in which they are participating.  In addition, they hypothesize that such support will influence women's assessment of the quality of that virtual community, and that women will more constantly than men rate their virtual community as having higher quality.  They surveyed 39 discussion boards, which they divided into men's, women's, and mixed boards.  As to be expected, women more than men were found to go to discussion boards for support. One of the interesting results they found is that the men surveyed also sought rapport and support, but did so more often in men's-only communities, presumably where an expectation of common language would be held, and did not rate them lower in quality, even though rapport-seeking can be considered as indicating inferior social status among men according to past sociolinguistic studies.  When the men did seek rapport in mixed-gender groups, it did not affect their assessment of the board's quality because there was an expectation of rapport-seeking inherent in the mixed-gender environment, since women were present and rapport-seeking is a characteristic of women's speech.  The authors admit that even as they tried to control for gender-bias in the chosen bulletin boards, that some of the communities were specifically support/rapport based (eg. cancer support) and that may have skewed the data towards women's speech and away from men's speech.

Tannen's text on gender and conversational interaction seeks to present research into gender differences in conversation as evidenced by direct speech data. The first section is comprised of data about friendship rapport, focusing on "girl talk" (Eder and Eckert, respectively) and storytelling among men and women (Johnstone).  The second part focuses on "conflict talk" both among children at school (Sheldon and Goodwin, respectively) and adults (Brown).  The third section becomes more theoretical as it attempts to rethink the nature of discourse in terms of power vs. solidarity (Tannen) and turn taking (Edelsky).  Finally, James and Clarke review the literature and attempt to reframe the discussion of conversational interruptions among men and women.  While none of this research deals with online communications, I believe that  such analyses can be extrapolated to apply to online discussions both as "female talk" and "conflict talk".

In this second edition of her text, Cameron begins with an introduction to the study of language along feminist lines.  She continues with a basic framework of linguistic approaches to language variation and gender and separates the feminist "folklinguistics" from actual empirical studies of language use.  The second half of the book becomes more theoretical, investigating the links between gender and grammar and debating about the power of sexist language.  She overviews the radical feminist theories of silence, oppression, and alienation of women via language.  Later, she recaps the ideas of Spender, Lacan, and Irigaray among others to discuss the concept of a "gendered subject" as seen in a Postmodernist context.  Finally, Cameron wraps up her work by posing issues and concerns to gender studies as she meditates on methods of integrating feminist discourse and language study into real world policies and social change.  While this book does not deal in computer-mediated discourse, the issues addressed are valid in online contexts as well. 

In this text, Coates and Cameron attempt to address in a quantitative way how sociolinguistic differences are found between men's and women's speech.  While the research does not include online communication, it does show grounded empirical studies of women in their own speech communities such as among British Black women and women in mining communities in Wales.  They go on to address gender differences in communication "style" above and beyond format, and delve into examples of gossip, tag questions, and shop talk as female or male speech.  In all cases, the authors attempt to challenge prior academic research and offer new perspectives on the task of analyzing speech on gender lines, as in the example of Swann's "Talk Control: an Illustration From the Classroom of Problems in Analyzing Male Dominance of Conversation."

In this academic text, Tannen begins by examining the relationship between power and solidarity in various linguistic strategies - namely indirect speech, interruptions, silence, topic changes, and conflict.  She continues to expand upon the cultural, ethnic, stylistic, and gendered differences in conversational interruptions.  She compares the physical alignment of speakers to topical cohesion of the discourse and finds positive correlations. Finally, with Robin Lakoff, she explores the pragmatics of conversational strategies from a selection for Scenes From a Marriage.  Unlike her general books, this text goes into more scientific linguistic detail and analysis which could prove useful to apply to internet speech between genders.