And although there’s nothing about certain social sites that exclude one sex or the other, it’s abundantly clear that some things about certain social networks are more attractive to men, and some things appeal to women. And the lines are rather clearly drawn.

First off, women are more likely to participate in social media in general. And they hold a commanding lead in two of the most popular networks – Facebook and Twitter. In fact, nearly 2/3 of Twitter users are women (and 58% of Facebook users).

Women also dominate Pinterest with more than four times the users as men.

On the flip side, reddit seems to be the guy’s version of Pinterest as they dominate the social aggregator with 84% of the membership.

Another interest fact about the sexes on social media is that there are more men on LinkedIn alone that al off the women on reddit, LinkedIn, and Google+ combined.

Check out the “Battle of the Sexes” in social media infographic below, courtesy of Digital Flash NYC.

[via Mashable]

But apparently, I’m abnormal. According to a new survey from the UK’s BT Retail, only 7% of men said that they would miss social media the most in a world bereft of internet.

The survey, which involved over 2,000 Brits, found that women are the more social-media crazy of the sexes. Compared to the men’s virtual lack of concern over the hypothetical lack of social media, 18% of women said that they would miss social media the most if the internet ceased to exist.

Over half of women said they actively use social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, while only 34% of men claimed the same.

The study also looked at other ways the sexes used the internet and found that (surprise) women are more apt to use it to look up shopping deals. Apparently, men are more likely to use the interwebs to “supplement their learning.”

So, what would men miss the most if it’s not Facebook and Twitter? Stuff like online banking, according to the survey.

“This research makes it clearer than ever how the nation has embraced the internet across all aspects of life and, in particular, the different way men and women use the Internet. People now take for granted that they can manage their life all in one place, from shopping and banking to entertainment and social media,” said BT’s John Petter.

Not only do people take it for granted, but many don’t fully realize how addicted they are to the constant hum of the web. Last year, young people across the world participated in an experiment that asked them to unplug from the internet for a day. The results were astounding, as they reported feelings of depression, isolation, and despair. “Emptiness overwhelmed me,” said one participant.

It’s pretty clear that a large portion of the population would be crippled without the internet, but according to this survey, what would hurt the most would depend on your chromosomes.

[Via Telegraph]

While women use social media more and would actually miss it more than men, men are more than twice as likely to share photos or videos of themselves on social media. In other words, while women might be getting comfortable with social media and find it as a great way to communicate with people, it seems like many of them, if not most of them, acutely remember how quickly their culture will objectify them or degrade them based solely on their appearance. In all, though, relatively few men and women said they regularly use photo and video sharing sites, 13% to 6%, respectively, suggesting that people in general are a little wary to share too much visual information with the pickled-brains and the bucketheads lurking around out there on the internet.

Women are also more patient shoppers than men when it comes to online commerce. 19% of women said they use the internet to find the best deals for an item, whereas 15% of men admitted to doing this. Honestly, I don’t see why these numbers aren’t higher for both sexes. I was at a discount bookstore yesterday and couldn’t so much as bring myself to purchase a $6 paperback book without first sitting down and checking two different sites to see how much I could get it online. Social media and the web in general have fundamentally altered the way shopping is done in this world so it’s hard to really imagine that there is still a vast amount of people who don’t bargain shop with every purchase.

See more marvels and wonders in the infographic below that BT put together.

Brought to you by BT Broadband

A study from NM Incite earlier this year revealed that 1 in 3 bloggers are mothers and in general moms are more likely to visit blogs. While women make up the majority of Facebook users, nearly 3 out of 4 moms visited Facebook in March. And yes, to perpetuate the misguided assumption that Pinterest is only for women, 61% of mothers are more likely to visit the site than the average American. What can I say, moms know a well-designed site when they see one.

Internet savvy moms are on the go a lot, too, as 50% of them access social media via mobile devices and more than 54% of les mères own a smartphone.

So what does this all look like? I’m glad you asked, because Nielsen knew you would ask and so it compiled an infographic that details what the moms of America are up to in their online lives. Happy (early) Mother’s Day, ladies, and don’t stop until you get enough internet.

Looking to combat that deficiency, Women Who Tech, a nonprofit organization directed at propelling women into the leadership levels of the tech world, is hosting the 4th Annual Women Who Tech TeleSummit on May 23, 2012, and will feature over two dozen high-profile tech experts (both men and women) speaking on a variety of topics related to succeeding in the tech industry. The focus, however, is to enable and encourage women to emerge from being mere consumers into positions of power within the industry.

Allyson Kapin, the founder of Women Who Tech, hopes that the conference can help change the landscape of leadership in the tech industry so that it more accurately reflects the consumer base that it serves. “The tech sector no longer belongs to pocket-protector toting guys hooked on sci-fi and video games,” she said. “The companies that recognize that will be the ones that succeed.”

Countless high-profile corporate boards have zero or, at the most, one female member, which is another issue that the conference will address. “Diverse tech and start-up teams are critical for innovation,” Kapin said. “We need gender-balanced perspectives in order to create technology and products that are innovative, useful, and meaningful to everyone.”

The Women Who Tech TeleSummit will be held Wednesday, May 23, 2012, from 11AM to 6PM EDT. The cost to attend the TeleSummit is $20 although sponsorships are also available via WomenWhoTech’s website.

In the meantime, Women Who Tech compiled an infographic detailing the persistent lack of women involved in the tech industry’s leadership and how, with its current makeup, it’s really not representative of the at-large tech community.

After concluding data collection in December 2011 from over 6,500 respondents, the site found that a towering 90% of editors on the open-source encyclopedia site are men, with a small slice, 9%, occupied by women and an even smaller 1% who identify as transsexual or transgender. The summary of the report composes a general demographic profile of a Wikipedia editor as male, a graduate student-level of education, familiarity with computer programming, someone who supports open source platforms, and a player of massively multiplayer online games. Additionally, the typical Wikipedia editor lives in either the United States or Europe.

In other words, the archetypal Wikipedia editor is what most people think about when they think about Western civilization.

The United States has the highest percentage of female editors among the countries included in the survey with 15%, but given that the actual U.S. population is split closer to a 50/50 share among men and women, that 15% is not that great; it’s only sounds good when the statistics of other countries’ Wikipedia editors are cited and Americans can say, “But women are only 3% in India,” or, “Brazil only has 7%.” Comparing yourself to the lowest possible figures isn’t really a great way to brag.

The only encouraging part about the second editors survey is that, according to Wikipedia’s blog entry about the results, 14% of new editors in 2011 were women, compared to 10% for 2010, 9% for 2009, and 8% for 2008.

Concern about a systemic bias infesting Wikipedia’s content due to editors being heavily skewed male (or heavily skewed in other demographic aspects, like country of origin or sexual orientation) has been the subject of debate over the past couple of years. In January 2011, the New York Times examined the gender gap prevalent on Wikipedia, citing examples of how the quality of articles could be potentially hindered when topics likely to be more sought after by women are left to be composed or edited by Wikipedia’s mostly male editor contingent.

Even the most famous fashion designers — Manolo Blahnik or Jimmy Choo — get but a handful of paragraphs. And consider the disparity between two popular series on HBO: The entry on “Sex and the City” includes only a brief summary of every episode, sometimes two or three sentences; the one on “The Sopranos” includes lengthy, detailed articles on each episode.

Is a category with five Mexican feminist writers impressive, or embarrassing when compared with the 45 articles on characters in “The Simpsons”?

Over a year later since that Times piece, similar discrepancies are still apparent. The article for a fictional recurring supporting character on The Simpsons, Sideshow Bob, has nearly the same length of a page as Catharine MacKinnon, a highly influential feminist, lawyer, and scholar who’s been active in reforming laws related to pornography and gender discrimination since the 1970s. Sideshow Bob’s page is also about the same length of the page for Thurgood Marshall, the first African-American Justice appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States.

Far be it from me to say that the length of content available for a subject on Wikipedia should merit its value or favor in society, but the length of an article is indicative of the amount of time spent writing it and given the detail in the Sideshow Bob Wikipedia entry, I’m concluding that more effort and time was spent writing that than the two pages I mentioned that are about real, politically important people. Additionally, the Sideshow Bob page has 72 citations; MacKinnon’s page has 29 and Marshall’s has 32.

The paucity of information available on Wikipedia about MacKinnon and Marshall is merely reflective of the fact that Sideshow Bob is what interests the site’s 90% male contributors, not historical figures who are of significance to minorities. Also, the lack of information on Wikipedia about the two is not because there is a lack of information in general about MacKinnon or Marshall. It just means that nobody cared that much to enrich the article.

The comparison of the pages recalls that anecdote people will use sometimes where they say that if civilization disappeared and then aliens excavated the remains of our planet a thousand years from now, the aliens would probably be left with the impression that idols like Elvis and iPhones were the gods we worshipped; or, at the very least, these artifacts were of vital importance to our culture due to their prominence in our lives.

Suppose this: if we actually survived long enough to be here for the first encounter of the third kind and, as an introduction to society, referred our new alien friends to Wikipedia for a little cultural primer, what will it say about our society that a fictional cartoon character has as much information (and with deeper detail) about him as some of the 20th century’s key progressive figures in the United States? Beyond western society, what does it say that Sideshow Bob has a lot more information on his page than, say, the page for the ancient Egyptian diety, Horus, whose mythology has been closely compared to Jesus Christ? Shouldn’t that be a little more important than a cartoon character that’s been around for 25 years or so?

Nobody will probably – and, really, should not – ever make the mistake of accusing Wikipedia of being perfect, but Wikipedia isn’t even close to decent with respect to diversity. A new paper recently published by a team of researchers at the Barcelona Media Foundation in Spain found that the heavy majority of contributors being male on Wikipedia is producing a very concerning slant in the site’s content. Examining the 15 largest language sites on Wikipedia, the researchers determined the top 5 most central persons from each language. Out of the 75 possible people listed, only 3 were women.

Moreover, the top 25 people on the English Wikipedia, which is the most popular language on Wikipedia, had only 2 women, and both of those were among the last 3 to appear on the list.

In the conclusion of their paper, the researchers note that “the gender gap among Wikipedia editors is a serious concern for the community.”

What’s more puzzling is that the general trend of women’s online activity throughout the internet is nowhere close to being reflected in the demographics of Wikipedia contributors. A Nielsen/McKinsey study from earlier this year showed that the majority of bloggers these days are women, so it’s not as if women just don’t have any interest in writing and publishing content on the internet.

Then again, Wikipedia’s demographic breakdown follows a similar trend observed in the greater world of newspapers, websites, and, well, life: for one reason or another, women just occupy less public space in general. In the media, the OpEd Project keeps track of the percentage of bylines written by men versus women and, for example, for the week of March 21, 2012, at the New York Times 83% of bylines were written by men; only 17% were by women. At the Washington Post, 85% of bylines were by men whereas only 15% were by women. Over at the Huffington Post, the numbers are slightly better but still skewed: 69% of the bylines were by men, 31% were by women.

The offline world is rife with deeply troubling gender issues that have unfortunately become commonplace in our culture. That Wikipedia is mimicking the way our culture has developed in First Life shouldn’t really come as any surprise but it’s jarring nonetheless. For instance, by simply indicating their gender on a test (as opposed to remaining anonymous), girls’ tests scores drop 20%. That insidious phenomenon coincides with a general drop in self-esteem among girls in their adolescent years. If women’s hesitation and diminished self-confidence exists in the offline world, anticipate that the phenomenon will be duplicated in the online world, as with what has happened on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales has speculated before that one cause for Wikipedia’s contributors being almost all male is because of the site’s “tech-geek roots,” but he said that the gender gap is something that Wikipedia would like to change. It’s laudable that the website wants to address the issue but Wikipedia hasn’t really been considered a “tech-geek” site in some years now. In other words, it’s less a Wikipedia problem and more a society problem. Good luck fixing that one, Mr. Wales.

Wikimedia Foundation executive director Sue Gardner has set a goal of increasing the portion of female contributors to 25% by 2015 and, should Wikipedia’s share of female contributors continue to increase at the same rate it has in the past year, that’s a feasible goal for 2015. Yet while that’s a significantly better ratio of men to women contributing to the site, it’s still far from equal portions and falls even shorter from mirroring the level of activity among women on the internet in general.

Whether the people running the size realize it or not, what Wikipedia essentially aims to do is up-end the entire pedagogy that society defaults to in regard to learned gender roles. It’s not an impossible task, but it’s a daunting task and one that, should Wales, Gardner, et al. find a way to change that, it could have implications for how we regard public space in general when it comes to welcoming participating from all genders.

Engineering Degree put together an inforgraphic that illustrates the disparity among the genders in the engineering field and highlights some of the more troubling aspects of this problem, such as how only 20% of women who obtain a degree in math and sciences actually have jobs in a related field. While some cultural gadflies bemoan that we’re not focusing as much on boys these days and are therefore leaving them behind in educational development, one need not really look much further than the information in this infographic to determine one of two things: that claim is false; or, if that claim is true, then our education system is failing in far worse, more perplexing ways than we can begin to imagine.

And no, it’s not because we pay teachers too much.

Created by: EngineeringDegree.net

Women are talking about Valentine’s Day twice as much as men are, but over two-thirds of them have expressed neutral feelings about cupid. I guess that’s good news for languid dudes trolling Twitter for some I-could-care-less ladies because the eligibility pool would be deep on that end. But, actually – scratch that. Don’t try to pick up people on Twitter for a Valentine’s date. Cupid isn’t interested in helping you, anyways.

Among the women talking about Valentine’s Day on Twitter, 36% of them are posting about how they don’t have a date. While it might be tempting to impose Leave It To Beaver-era gender expectations on that statistic, the NM Incite study that compiled this data doesn’t qualify those tweets as positive or negative. Who knows, that 36% may be exclaiming their relief that they don’t have a date this year and don’t have to worry themselves with the rigmarole inherent in Valentine’s Day activities. Additionally, 32% of women realize Valentine’s Day is coming but, once again, the sample isn’t qualified as expressing that sentiment with a negative or positive affect.

True, the first graph above indicates that women talk positively about Valentine’s Day twice as much as men do on Twitter. In fact, women seem to be the majority of people talking about the holiday in general. Instead of portraying women as “more excited” about the holiday, I’m going to infer that women are simply less cynical about the holiday than men are.

Anyways. The results of a study conducted by uSamp on the info-sharing habits of men and women on social media show that men are more likely than women to share personal information on social media sites like their email address, location, and physical address. Each year over 3 million adults report being stalked (hey, did you know that January is Stalking Awareness Month?), and given it’s common but not limited to that women being stalked by men, it’s hardly a stretch of the imagination to wonder why some women might be more reluctant to share their personal information.

Still, certain personal details about men and women appear to be less guarded, such as birthdate, education level, and occupation. Given that those are the standard give-aways on sites like Facebook and Google+, that’s not really that surprising.

Take a look at the statistics below in the infographic that uSamp put together and comment below about anything you find intriguing or surprising.

Some people were unhappy that Google+ forced members to list their gender publicly. When creating a profile, users must select male, female or other, and that information was visible to everyone, with no option to make it private.

Until now. Google+ Profiles Product Manager Frances Haugen posted this on her Google+ account late last night –

Great news! I’m proud to announce Google+ Profiles is launching a new privacy enhancement in response to user feedback. Starting later this week, you will be able to set the privacy setting of your gender on your Google+ Profile just as you control other information about yourself.

Why were some users upset about the lack of gender privacy? Randall Munroe, of web comic XKCD explained the issue on a Google+ post last week. Hat tip to Gizmodo for pointing me towards this post –

Google+ forces you to have a public gender in your profile (although it can be ‘Other’). I know they have reasons for this, but I don’t think they’re good enough.

Many women grow up with a sense of physical vulnerability that’s hard for men to appreciate. Our culture’s relentless treatment of women as objects teaches them that they are defined by the one thing that men around them want from them—men who are usually bigger, stronger, and (like any human) occasionally crazy. This feeling—often confirmed by actual experiences of harassment and assault—can lead, understandably, to a lifetime of low-level wariness and sense of vulnerability that men have trouble appreciating. A male designer building an interface should try to keep in mind that there are reasons a female user might feel uncomfortable being told she has to broadcast her gender. Sure, someone’s gender is usually obvious from their name, but there’s no need to force people to draw extra attention to it—introducing myself with “Hi, I’m Randall.” sends a different message from “Hi, I’m Randall, and I’m a MAN.”

I don’t think making this option mandatory is a significant cause of the major Google+ early-adopter gender split, but if you’re worried about how few female users your project has, marginalizing their potential worries on your introductory screen doesn’t seem very bright.

And selecting “other” as a way to hide your actual gender from the public is really not a great option. There are plenty of situations where people have legitimate reasons to list their gender as “other,” but if you identify yourself as a man or a woman and simply want to hide that fact from the public, “other” isn’t a good choice.

Haugen also shared this YouTube video where she explains the motivations behind Google’s gender policy. She explains that one of the ways Google+ uses your gender is to “make it more conversational.” For example, you might receive a notification saying “Josh added you to his circles.”

Users that choose to make their gender private will now be referred to with the gender-neutral word “their” as in “Josh added you to their circles.” This move is bound to explode the heads of grammar purists who feel as though “their” is an inappropriate gender-neutral pronoun.

Haugen explains this choice by saying that Google knows this is “grammatically questionable,” but they “value helping people control their privacy as being much more important as being grammatically perfect.”

Check out her video below –