Color me not surprised.

Happy New Year everyone!

Just thought I'd point you all to the latest Pew report on Internet usage, broken down by gender, in case you haven't seen it.

Coupla high points:

*Young women outpace young men (that's 18-29 years old, incase you were wondering about today's definition of "young") 86% to 80%.
*Among African Americans, 60 percent of women are online, compared with 50 percent of men.

One low point:

*The only reason men still hold a 68% to 66% overall advantage is that in the oldest age segment (65 and older) men lead women 34 to 21%. Ouch. That'll be a stat we'll be talking about at our SXSW Interactive Respect Your ElderBloggers session.

There's other interesting info about adoption patterns, and I thought something else too: with women getting online as much, and often more, than their male counterparts, it's clear that developers need to care quite a bit about our perspective, no?

One last key data point, pulled not from the news story about the report, but from Pew's site:

"Still, our data show that men and women are more similar than different in their online lives, starting with their common appreciation of the internet’s strongest suit: efficiency. Both men and women approach with gusto online transactions that simplify their lives by saving time on such mundane tasks as buying tickets or paying bills.

Men and women also value the internet for a second strength, as a gateway to limitless vaults of information. "

Comments

[Marilyn]

From a strictly blogging perspective, I'm always shocked when I read stories about blogging in the press and the blogs mentioned more often than not are written by men. There are only a handful of men on my blogroll...and when I look at the blogrolls of blogging friends, I often see a similar trend. Men seem to dominate blogging press...but I often wonder if women don't dominate the blogging landscape.

[Elisa Camahort]

From our original Mission post, I found these stats: Women represent roughly half of all bloggers. A Perseus Development Corp. survey (12.04) reported 56 percent of blogs are created by women. A Pew Internet survey (1.05) reported that 43 percent of bloggers are women.

So either way the dominance of the male blogging persona in the press is a little out of whack :)

[Improbulus]

Hi there Elisa, happy new year! Yes I noticed that one too. In my own post about the blog I made a very gentle dig about it being women, rather than men, who look up directions/maps on the Web, but no one seems to have risen to the bait - restrained of 'em or what?! :D

[Tracy]

how do I join blogher?

[Elisa Camahort]

Tracy: I have added you to the BlogHerRoll. In addition you can subscribe to our RSS feed here, sign up for our Newsletter, attend BlogHer in July and otherwise become a fixture around here :)

Oh, you can volunteer, you can submit yourself as a speaker, you can introduce other women bloggers to us and vice versa.

The BlogHer possibilities are endless! Welcome!