Over the past couple months there have been numerous stories about how women are intimidated from using computers and related technologies. Studies, almost always based on anecdotes, attempting to show the web and Internet industries are still all-male bastions are a dime a dozen.
Unfortunately for those claims, a new study highlights the reality — more women use the web than men. The study, by Media Metrix and Jupiter Communications, found that during the first quarter of 2000, 50.4 percent of U.S. web users were women and girls. Moreover, the number of female web users is growing faster than the general population of web users. While the number of total Web users grew by 22.4 percent during 1999, the survey of 55,000 Americans found that the number of female users grew by 34.9 percent.
The age breakdown is fascinating as well. The conventional feminist wisdom is that young teenage girls are turned off by male-oriented computer games and male computer culture and give up using computers. But last year the number of girls 12-17 who used the web increased by a whopping 125 percent.
Aside from the data about the high level of female users, the other interesting fact was that the heavily funded sites geared toward women, such as Oxygen.Com, don’t draw the sort of heavy female audience that they had hoped. Instead the list of most visited web sites for women reads a lot like the most visited sites for men, with AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo! web sites at the top of popularity (which is not surprising given how vapid and dumbed down sites such as Oxygen.Com tend to be).
Source:
The Web: It’s a Women’s Thing. Reuters August 9, 2000.
The Who Says Women Are Afraid of Computers? by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
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