Cukier study: female user names receive overwhelming amount of unwanted messages

Assistant Professor Michel Cukier (ME) and his sophmore computer engineering student Robert Meyer recently found that female-name internet relay chat (IRC) users receive 25 times more threatening and/or sexually explicit private messages than those with male or ambiguous usernames. Their study will be published in the proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks in June. In the meantime, it is making headlines in the media.

Alex Dominguez of the Associated Press wrote about the research in a story that has been picked up by major organizations such as ABC News, The Washington Post The Boston Herald, The San Francisco Chronicle and USA Today. The story also has been carried on radio and online (see links below).