{"id":2140,"date":"2013-10-13T19:20:04","date_gmt":"2013-10-13T19:20:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/?p=2140"},"modified":"2013-10-28T12:12:59","modified_gmt":"2013-10-28T12:12:59","slug":"how-has-the-web-affected-gender-equality-a-philosophical-and-psychological-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/2013\/10\/13\/how-has-the-web-affected-gender-equality-a-philosophical-and-psychological-study\/","title":{"rendered":"How is gender equality represented on the web? A Philosophical and Psychological Study."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This isn&#8217;t as some might think just an excuse to attack the male gender and point out the sites used to discriminate against females; rather looking at how the web has (in places) facilitated gender divides. There are websites, Facebook groups, forums, etc, set up in the name of promoting one gender over the other. The web (as in many areas such as cyber bullying) given people a safe impersonal place to display their prejudices and explore them with like minded people. Unfortunately it&#8217;s much easier to sit there and argue that your gender is superior than fight with both factions to say that everyone is the same. I support this topic and the arguments for it are essentially the same as cyber bullying, racism, ageism or any such discrimination on the web, although I would say that this was more of a grey area, and since it is one of personal interest I have chosen this specific section for my review.<\/p>\n<p>The disciplines I have chosen are psychology and philosophy as I know absolutely nothing about them, and they have some relevance to this issue.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Psychology:<\/strong><br \/>\nThe areas that will be studied here are the basic principles of psychology particularly emphasising on behavioural psychology and why people behave the way they do in relation to gender inequality. Reading will focus on both feminist psychology values (and whether they are actually a set of values geared towards equality or if they are more geared towards female bias), in addition to finding out more about the male psyche. Both of these areas are relevant to the topic as they explore both sides of the coin, and on top of this I will be studying why people find the web an easier medium for their prejudices than face to face; and whether the web has brought out a &#8216;freer&#8217; element for people to express their opinions, or actually negatively enhanced people&#8217;s ability to impersonalise discrimination.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Philosophy:<\/strong><br \/>\nPhilosophy wise, the areas that seem most relevant and interesting to this topic are: firstly, the ultimate question of &#8216;what is equality&#8217; gender or otherwise, from a philosophical standpoint; secondly an ethical investigation of how equality should be promoted, and what actually counts as discrimination. Philosophy leaves a lot of room for personal interpretation, and so does a lot of the material on the web, where should the line be drawn between a joke and something that is actually a discriminatory comment?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Philosophical Psychological View:<\/strong><br \/>\nFinally these two disciplines will be looked at together in relation to this issue; hopefully to combine the ethical definitions of equality from a philosophical point of view, with the behavioural psychology points of view to better understand how the web has actually affected gender equality.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Blog Post Plan:<br \/>\n<\/strong>Week 1 (14th Oct) &#8211; Intro<br \/>\nWeek 2 (21st Oct) &#8211; Philosophy 1 &#8211; Defining Equality &amp; Arguments against Equality<br \/>\nWeek 3 (28th Oct) &#8211; Psychology 1 &#8211; Methodology of Psychology<br \/>\nWeek 4 (4th Nov) &#8211; Philosophy 2 &#8211; Methodology of Philosophy<br \/>\nWeek 5 (11 Nov) &#8211; Psychology 2 &#8211;\u00a0Defining Gender &amp; A Gender View of the Web<br \/>\nWeek 6 (18 Nov) &#8211; Philosophy 3 &#8211; Key Question: What defines an gender equal web in terms of philosophy?<br \/>\nWeek 7 (25 Nov) &#8211; Psychology 3 &#8211;\u00a0\u00a0Key Question: What defines an gender equal web in terms of psychology?<br \/>\nWeek 8 (2nd Dec) &#8211; Philosophy 4 &#8211; Philosophical Conclusions<br \/>\nWeek 9 (9th Dec) &#8211; Psychology 4 &#8211; Psychological Conclusions<br \/>\nWeek 10 (16th Dec) &#8211; Philosophy of Psychology<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This isn&#8217;t as some might think just an excuse to attack the male gender and point out the sites used to discriminate against females; rather looking at how the web has (in places) facilitated gender divides. There are websites, Facebook groups, forums, etc, set up in the name of promoting one gender over the other. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86008,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[263],"tags":[258759,432,644767],"class_list":["post-2140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-psychology","tag-gender-equality","tag-philosophy","tag-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86008"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2140"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2548,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2140\/revisions\/2548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/comp6044\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}