The Gendered Digital Divide: Logging Off Against Digital Segregation
Guest Newsletter by Mischa Gerrard
Each Sunday evening I join around thirty others at my university chaplaincy for Mass. The room is quiet and softly lit, a handful of familiar faces settling into their seats. Phones are tucked away - not by rule but by instinct - as if everyone understands that silence is part of the bargain. For an hour, time moves differently. The world outside might scroll on endlessly, but in here attention becomes collective again. In a world that never stops refreshing, it feels almost radical.
Step back online, and the contrast is immediate. Sociologist Alice Evans recently told The New York Times that men and women are now living in “distinct digital worlds,” a form of segregation driven less by ideology than by solitude. Algorithms quietly reward our most familiar habits: men drawn toward politics, fitness, and grievance; women toward wellness, activism, aesthetics, and self-improvement. What begins as preference hardens into partition. We scroll inside parallel ecosystems that rarely overlap, and the longer we stay within them, the harder it is to break out of them.
The platforms profit from this separation. The more curated our feeds become, the less we share a common emotional language. Even friendship across gender lines has thinned, replaced by distance, misreading, and increased hostility. Technology once promised connection; somewhere along the way it began to organise our isolation. What disappears isn’t only dialogue but empathy - the ability to recognise one another outside the templates the screen provides. We may all be logged on, but we are rarely in the same room.
I met my partner, a man I now live with, not through an app but across the floor of my university’s debating society - arguing, predictably, about something neither of us can now remember. It’s an origin story I find quietly funny: we started off disagreeing, and somehow that set the tone. The room wasn’t romantic – that much is certain. It was fluorescent-lit, chaotic, and full of people who enjoyed being right. But it was also one of the last spaces I’ve known where disagreement still felt relatively safe.
There’s a particular kind of attention required when you’re face to face with someone who thinks differently. You can’t block or mute or disappear into a comment thread or craft a reply for effect. You have to listen properly, to notice tone, timing, expression. You learn when to yield, when to press, and how to stay respectful. It’s a skill the internet has mostly trained out of us - replaced with dunking, posturing, trolling, and selective hearing.
Constant connectivity was supposed to make us less alone. Instead, it’s perfected the art of loneliness. In the quiet of scrolling, we are surrounded by the reverberating noise of the echo chamber. Technology now outcompetes nearly every form of in-person interaction, offering frictionless affirmation without the risk of real exchange. It’s easy, safe, and always available - which is precisely why it’s so hard to put down.
Alice Evans calls this a “new solitude,” one that disguises itself as engagement. We refresh, scroll, and reply, mistaking reaction for relationship. The design is subtle but effective: keep people busy enough that they forget what genuine connection feels like. It’s not just about distraction - it’s about emotional muscle memory. The less we practise presence, the more alien it becomes.
I see this in my own research all the time: men and women drifting deeper into algorithmic niches that reward certainty and discourage empathy. The distance that begins on-screen doesn’t stay there. It seeps outward, into classrooms, workplaces, and relationships, until conversation itself starts to feel like confrontation. That, to me, is the real cost of constant connection - not isolation in the technical sense, but estrangement dressed up as community.
If digital life fragments us, then offline spaces - however small or inconsistent - are where repair begins. Groups like Logging Off Club create the conditions for a kind of attention the internet can’t simulate: slow, reciprocal, freely given. When the phones go down, conversation changes shape. People speak differently when they know they’re being heard rather than recorded.
For me, that same quality exists each Sunday evening at Mass. I wasn’t raised in the Catholic tradition, yet over the past year this hour has become a small but steady refuge - a grounding point in a culture that rarely pauses. For others, that space might look different: a choir, a reading group, a craft circle, even just a dinner table where the screens stay face down - any setting where phones fall silent and attention returns to the body. What unites these spaces is not belief but intentional presence: the act of showing up without distraction, of being with others in real time.
Stepping away from the digital world isn’t about withdrawal or moral purity; it’s about balance, remembering that attention is finite, and that some of the most vital forms of connection still happen offline. We can’t live entirely disconnected, but we can decide where connection feels real. What matters isn’t where it happens, but that it happens at all: spaces that protect attention, however small, are increasingly acts of resistance.
We’d love to hear your reflections on life online or offline, to write for our guest newsletter get in touch: loggingoffclub@gmail.com
Mischa Gerrard is an independent researcher and postgraduate student completing an MA in Violence, Terrorism, and Security at Queen’s University Belfast. Her research examines the architecture of digital harm, focusing on online radicalisation and the prevention of violence against women and girls.
