Vol. 105 Issue 89
@thepittnews
UPSET SPECIAL Womenʼs basketball knocks off No. 8 UNC for 1st ACC win Mark Powell Staff Writer One game removed from a narrow loss to a highly ranked Louisville team, the Pitt women’s basketball team was able to play the role of spoiler. The team defeated the eighth-ranked North Carolina Tar Heels 84-59 in a monumental win for the program. Brianna Kiesel led the way, scoring 22 points while recording nine rebounds and five assists. Monica Wignot and Stasha Carey added 18 and 17 points respectively. Having already beaten perennial tournament teams Michigan and Ohio State this season, the Panthers looked calm and collected against one of the top teams in the ACC. They claimed their first win against a ranked opponent since 2011. “I couldn’t be more proud of the way [the team] executed the game plan,” head coach Suzie McConnell-Serio said. “It was a great game to be a part of.” Pitt’s goal was clear from the beginning: to force the Tar Heels to beat them with the outside shot, as UNC has only hit 30 percent of their attempts from behind the arc this year.
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Friday, January 9, 2015
Pittnews.com
Study shows emoticons bust gender stereotypes
Anjana Murali Staff Writer When it comes to emotions, smiley faces are the great gender equalizer between men and women. In a 2000 study, Alecia Wolf, an assistant dean at the University of Texas at Tyler, looked at how people express themselves online through emoticons, keyboard characters used to represent faces. Wolf found that the age-old stereotypes of the emotional woman and inexpressive man may not apply to electronic communications. Through her study, Wolf concluded that, when men and women message as part of a mixed-gender group, gender has little effect on the frequency of emoticon usage. “It’s so hard to convey non-verbal cues, like tone of voice and facial expression, in text-based communication, and I think emoticons do a great job of conveying this information for us,” said Meredith Guthrie, a lecturer in media communication at Pitt. “You can let the
other people in your discussion know that you’re kidding, or that you’re angry, with just a few simple keystrokes.” When Wolf began her research, she said there were two prevalent, yet conflicting, beliefs about the Internet. One belief claimed that, since the Internet was male-dominated, it replicated the offline environment where the gender bias favored males in the working world. “The Internet was viewed by some as inherently masculine and unfriendly at best — hostile at worst — to women,” Wolf said. The second dominant belief was that the Internet was “the great equalizer,” Wolf said, because “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” like the old adage states. This means that because men and women can remain anonymous and hide whether or not they are male or female online, it’s much more difficult for readers to uphold gender biases in the Internet world. With this in mind, Wolf wanted to explore if race, sex, class, age, etc., disappeared online, would the internet pos-
sibly be a hostile environment for women. “Since stereotypes already existed regarding gendered emotional expression, and the widespread use of emoticons was also a relatively new phenomenon, it seemed like an interesting place to start,” Wolf said. Wolf ’s research revealed that there is a distinct change in the kinds of emoticons used when men and women converse in a same-gender group, rather than in a mixed-gender group. Wolf said in her study that “the majority of emoticon use by females lies in the meaning category of humor; the bulk of male emoticon use expresses teasing/sarcasm.” Additionally, when moving from same-gender to mixed-gender groups, male frequency of emoticon use increases greatly and use of teasing, sarcasm and humor decreases. Meanwhile, women use more emoticons to express teasing, sarcasm and humor in mixed-gender groups. The study showed that the basic smiley :), the basic frowny :(, and the basic winky
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