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.

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Winter and Huff's study focuses on a 1996 survey of a women's only online bulletin board for computer scientists called SYSTERS. Although the study is 9 years old, it still brings voice to women who were previously marginalized as gender minorities in their field of work/study.  The authors discuss the issue of same-gender boards being both "havens" and "ghettos" for women online, and also provide some support for Cass Sunstein's theory that the internet allows for the consolidation of like opinions - both positive and negative, as in the case of women's forums and online sexual harassment, respectively.  Based upon their work, the authors felt that the differences between the genders in online communication was equal or magnified to that present in speech.

In this text, Herring brings together a variety of sociological and linguistic essays on computer-mediated communications.  In the first section, "Linguistics Perspectives", the authors seek to define the oral and written linguistics aspects of email, IRC chat, and computer conferencing while contrasting them with face-to-face interactions.  In the second section, "Social and Ethical Perspectives", the authors deal with social issues of interaction such as cooperation versus conflict and the role of radical feminism for internet discourse ("Cyberfeminism" by Kira Hall).  The third portion deals with "Cross Cultural Perspectives" in which CMC is analysed between North American, East Asian, and Mexican students and theories of classroom diversity are presented.  Finally, the last grouping "CMS and Group Interaction" explores how CMC can change people's lives - exploring the group dynamics of online forums (Korenman and Wyatt, "Group Dynamics in an Email Forum"), how e-mail has changed the work environment, and how groups conduct internet-based protests.

In this study, Fahy analyzed written texts from on online conference of graduate students in a distance learning exercise.  He and his team hypothesized that the women's speech would be more "epistolary" in participation style as previously described by other researchers, and would most likely contain more hedges, qualifiers, first and second person pronouns, and parenthetical constructions with the intent of reducing any potential conflict and sustaining ongoing dialog.  He likewise hypothesized that the men's speech would be more "expository", using less of the aforementioned forms as well as being more declarative.  They also predicted that the men would use a greater number of linguistic intensifiers and would be more prone to flaming and/or rudeness.  While their results were not overwhelmingly strong, the numbers did support the base hypotheses of inherent differences in men's and women's discourse.  Fahy goes on to discuss what the potential effect upon distance learning may be if professors do not take into account the differences between epistolary and expository styles regardless of the participants' gender.

In this class textbook, Sunstein reveals her fears about the "Daily Me", the process by which individuals today can filter ever more increasing amounts of electronic information to fit a highly personal profile, such that they can see only that information they wish to see in the world.  In addition, she speaks about the convergence and polarization of ideas and the groups which espouse them, on the internet to the extent that she uses the term "balkanization" for some online communities such as race hate groups or political sites.  When people of a like mind do get together on a newsgroup, bulletin board, website, or chat room, it is found that members tend to further gravitate to those who have strong, defined opinions on topics of interest and concern for those individuals.  If that is the case, if one believes that women's speech is quantitatively different from men's speech and that women may find more community by remaining in the online company of women, then it may be the case that women and men may divide their online participation among more gendered lines.  Also, the way that strong opinions, criticism, and conflict are handled online may have a direct relationship to whether or not women will espouse new ideas or new online venues outside of their known social spheres.