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 –

• Most bloggers are 21-35 years old
• 51% of all blog posts are written by females
• USA contributes to a third of all blog posts, followed by the UK
• Japan accounts for the third-most bloggers (4.9%), followed by Brazil (4.2%), Canada (3.9%), Germany (3.3%), Italy (3.2%), Spain (3.1%), France (2.9%) and Russia (2.3%).
• California had the highest share of bloggers in the US
• Ontario was the top province in Canada

Grammatical errors in the messages Facebook uses to personalize pronouns when members communicate with their friends have increased since the site launched in other countries that do not speak English.

"We’ve gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles," said Naomi Gleit, a Facebook product manager. "People who haven’t selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex entirely in Mini-Feed stories."

If members don’t declare which sex they are they will receive a prompt asking if they want to be referred to as "him" or "her." That information will not be visible in members "basic information" but will be displayed in mini-feeds and news feed stories.

Facebook will allow members to opt – out if they do not want to specify their gender. They will be able to remove reference of their gender from messages about their activities.

The option is similar to a feature that allows members to not display their birthdays or remove the year they were born.
 

Roughly 80 percent of the people Rapleaf studied had between one and 100 online friends.  In this segment, women had an average of 62 pals, while men had five fewer.  Moving up to the 100-1,000 friend range, the difference remained similar, with women averaging 185 friends and men 172 connections.

 Men, Women Network Differently

The Rapleaf report states, "While we theorize that women spend more time on social networks, building and nurturing relationships, we also theorize that men are less likely to spend as much time nurturing relationships as they are acquiring relationships from a transactional standpoint.  Spending less time on a social network but transacting more equates to having roughly the same number of friends as women, who spend more time on social networks, but are busier sustaining relationships."

It’s only when looking at people with more than 1,000 friends that men took the (slight) lead.  Look for serious businesspeople, musicians, and celebrities in this category; the average person doesn’t have so large an address book.

Rapleaf studied 30.74 million people with at least one online friend, and included networks like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Flickr, Friendster, Hi5, and LiveJournal, so its results are hard to dispute.  Marketers (and individuals) may come to value online contact with women a little more as a result.