War of the gender reborn on the internet: Women socialize, men gather information

I’ve seen it coming for some time, and now I’ve documented it: while men and women are equally represented online, both in terms of the number of users and the amount of time they spend, you find significant differences when you scratch the surface.

In my new “digital view”-report (se below) I find that 1,3 million Danish women spend nearly 14 million hours updating and reading status messages in August 2009, while 1,1 million Danish men spend nearly 7 million hours in the same period. And I find that men used a little more than 8 million hours keeping themselves up to date on news-site, while women spend only nearly 4 million hours.

The analysis clearly draws up the image of a divided internet, in which women networks while men gather information.

It’s almost like taking a time-machine back in time to the first human societies, where men went out hunting, while the women stayed back home taking care of bringing up the kids etc. The differences are so huge, it’s bound to create conflicts of some kind. And they’re so significant we’ll have to ask ourselves what this means both to the way we conduct business and arrange our society.

Read on:

War of the gender reborn on the internet: Women socialize, men gather information

[Download as pdf]