One might find it sadly obvious that chatrooms users are more likely to receive abusive messages from all sorts of people if they have a female pseudonym but a recent study by the University of Maryland’s A. James Clark School of Engineering went a bit further. They discovered that chatroom participants with female usernames received 25 times more threatening and/or sexually explicit private messages than those with male or ambiguous usernames.

The study focused on internet relay chat or IRC chatrooms, which are among the most popular chat services but offer widely varying levels of user security. The researchers, Robert Meyer and Michel Cukier logged into various chatrooms under female, male and neutral/ambiguous usernames, and counted the number of times they were contacted and tracked the contents of those messages.

Using bots to act as chatroom users (one very talkative, one silent and one moderately talkative) they found out that female usernames, on average, received 163 malicious private messages a day in the study.

The research stresses that the bots are not behind most malicious messages. Cukier notes: “The extra attention the female usernames received and the nature of the messages indicate that male, human users specifically targeted female users”.

Melanie Killen, professor of human development at UM’s College of Education and associate director of the Center for Children, Relationships and Culture commented: “Gender stereotypes and gender-targeted messages are very prevalent in internet chat rooms. Some people use the protected anonymity of the internet to send provocative messages, often basing their assumptions about the recipient of the messages on very little information”. Adding, “Parents should be very concerned, but they are closing their eyes to it because they don’t know how to deal with it.”

The whole study “Assessing the Attack Threat due to IRC Channels” can be downloaded on the website of Michel Cukier.