Survey says: Women are more social than men
In November 2007, Rapleaf (an online reputation service) published the results of their survey, which concludes that women belong to social networks more so than do men.
The analysis of the gender breakout by specific social network is not surprising. Except for LinkedIn (see Note), the other networks analyzed (Facebook, Friendster, Hi5, MySpace and Plaxo) scored a greater percentage of women subscribers -- which aligns with the gender breakout for non-online social networks.
According to Social Networks - Gender Differences In Social Networks published in the Marriage and Family Encyclopedia
Research indicates that men and women structure their personal [social] networks differently and that networks may serve different functions for husbands and wives. For example, wives generally report larger networks of kin and greater network interconnectedness than husbands.
Bottom line: Online social networks that generate more "warm and fuzzies" of connectedness are more likely to have a greater percentage of female subscribers.
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Note: Though I couldn't find statistics of LinkedIn registrants by gender, only two of the of the top 50 are women. Thanks to Linked Intelligence for the pointer.
Comments
Doesn't surprise me really. I think women are more social than men in general, not just on the web. Women can sit and talk for hours about all sorts of things while men don't tend to naturally.
Posted by: Tim Jahn | June 2, 2008 12:33 AM