Description: The aim of this paper is to explore the gendered nature of the UK academic culture which privileges research over teaching and administration, with particular reference to the impact on that culture of the use of the Internet. The 'publish or perish' phenomenon is something which has dominated the UK academic culture for many years. Appointment, promotion, status and pay have historically been linked with the level and quality of research output, largely in preference to other aspects of academic work such as teaching and administration (Court 1999). This research culture has been further entrenched in the UK Higher Education system through the advent of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) every five to seven years, in which peer panels of subject experts determine the quality of research outputs which are then linked to funding.Yet many would argue that this reliance on research output as the objective measure of academic performance is a deeply gendered concept and has traditionally disadvantaged women leaning towards the 'caring' tasks of the profession - pastoral/ teaching/administration duties and tasks rather than the competitive, often solitary, single focussed, research tasks (Bagilhole and Goode 2001; Harley 2003). The risk here is that women then produce less research than men (Brooks 1997) with a concomitant effect on their careers and promotion prospects. But the way academics conduct research has been changing over the past decade with the increasing use of Internet technologies in almost every aspect of the research process, and although Internet use in teaching and learning is being heavily researched and funded, the impact that it is having on personal research is something that has not been well researched to date. The Internet has the potential to speed up research production and ease the process of researching through the use of electronic journals, e-mail communication, Internet websites and Internet-based research methods. This may well be to the advantage of women who, studies have shown, are more likely to be time-pressured than their male colleagues (Acker and Feuerverger 1996; Bagilhole and Goode 2001; Deem and Hillyard 2002). However, there is a significant body of work which suggests that men have adopted Internet technologies more rapidly than women and have less anxiety about using them (e.g. Schumacher and Morahan-Martin 2001, Ford and Miller 1996) suggesting that extensive use of the Internet in research might constitute a further obstacle for academic women looking for career progression through research production.My research looks as the use made of different Internet technologies in the research process in the UK by both men and women and probes some of the attitudes and experiences of academics in relation to the role in, or absence of, the Internet in their research process and the changes that it has made possible for those who make use of the Internet. In this paper I will be presenting some of my findings from a national survey and qualitative interviews, addressing the question 'How is the gendered nature of the UK academic research culture affected by increased use of the Internet?' Methodology: I am adopting a mixed methods approach with a large UK-wide survey of academics to establish current practice of male and female academics with regard to Internet use in their research followed by qualitative interviews to elicit deeper attitudes and beliefs surrounding the impact of the Internet on research, academic culture and careers. Conclusions: A review of the survey results shows small but significant differences in the way that men and women use the Internet in the research process, suggesting that women are developing new ways of communicating and networking with colleagues and collaborators, bypassing the traditional male methods (after-work drinking, sporting events, infomal networks) that have proved problematic for them in the past (Mavin and Bryans 2002). Deeper implications of the differences and similarities between male and female use of the Internet in the research process are being drawn out in the interviews.