When 12-year-old Clover Reshad gets home from school, she will have something
to eat and say hello to her dog Hector. She might shout at her annoying
brother and watch some television, then she will head upstairs to her
bedroom to do her homework. This is when the computer goes on.
“I use the computer a lot. At least a couple of days a week to help with my
homework and I keep an eye on [the social networking sites] Bebo and
Facebook every day to see who’s on it,” she said. “I’ll check shops to see
if I can buy things I want cheaper online or to make sure they have
something in my size.
“I MSN [instant message] my friends. The computer also makes it easy to stay
in touch with my dad because he lives in Los Angeles.”
Reshad sees her activity as no different from using a mobile phone or
television. It is intrinsic to her life and friendships. “There are a few
girls at school who don’t use Bebo and Facebook but it’s not because they
don’t want to - it’s because their parents won’t let them,” she said. “I do
feel sorry for them.”
Reshad’s activity in her bedroom in Godalming, Surrey, echoes that of millions
of girls around the world. New research suggests it is time to rethink the
stereotypical net user as a pasty-faced male geek in Joe 90 specs, or the
furtive spotty teen looking for zeppelin breasts online. The most prolific
net users are now girls and young women.
A recent study by the Pew Internet Project in America on teens in social media
found that blogging growth among teenagers is almost entirely fuelled by
girls, whom it describe as a new breed of “super-communicators”. Some 35% of
girls, compared with 20% of boys, have blogs; 32% of girls have their own
websites, against 22% of boys.
Girls have embraced social networking sites on a massive scale, with 70% of
American girls aged 15-17 having built and regularly worked on a profile
page on websites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook, as opposed to 57% of
boys of the same age.
John Horrigan of the Pew Internet Project says these figures are likely to be
echoed throughout the West. “The internet is a very expressive medium and
you’re looking at times in a girl’s life when they are very socially
expressive; the internet, and social networking particularly, enables that
need,” he said.
Figures from the UK back up Horrigan’s hunch. A survey done by Hitwise, an
internet research company, in January found that almost 55% of all British
users of social networking websites were women. Similar research by Nielsen
Online shows that women aged 18-24 account for 17% of all users of the
social sites, while men in the same age group account for 12%.
What has caused a phenomenon that one academic has hailed as “the feminisation
of the internet”? Are girls really the new cyberpioneers? THERE is
widespread agreement that the prime driver behind the enthusiastic uptake of
the internet by young girls is their desire to gossip. Activity that used to
take place on the telephone, to the frustration of many parents who were
often hit with painful phone bills, now happens online.
“If you look at young girls, they do more communicating than young boys and
that’s what they are doing on the web,” said Professor Anthony White, a
lecturer in the school of computing science at Middlesex University. “It’s
just natural for them.”
Few would disagree. Yet to stereotype these girls’ activity as all gossip and
fluff would be unfair.
Anna McCleary is the editor of Slink, the BBC’s popular website for 13 to
16-year-old girls which receives 1m hits a day. She is constantly surprised
by what catches her readers’ attention.
“I don’t dare to assume anything about the girls that visit the site,” she
said. “Their interests are amazingly diverse – from dinosaurs to the Foals
[a popular indie band]. We’ve had 1,000 unsolicited responses to a piece on
first-choice schools in the past three days alone.
“What I do know is that we are part of their real lives.”
In this there is an observable difference between the sexes. Even at 12 Reshad
has noticed it.
“Girls use the internet for gossiping and finding things out about friends and
people you know. Boys use it more for useful things like games,” she said.
Matthew Bagwell edits a website for girls called My Kinda Place and Monkey
Slum, a similar magazine site aimed at teenage boys.
“Girls consume online very differently to boys,” he said. “Monkey Slum forums
are just dead; on My Kinda Place the forums are extremely popular. Girls
will browse, take a real journey around the site. Social networking has
really captured a young female audience.
“I put this down to girls being open to communicating, having longer attention
spans and more widespread interests. We have to be inventive and diverse in
our female content. Boys are easier, they will download pictures from
galleries, viral ads and videos, but they’re in and out again.”
Indeed, the YouTube phenomenon, where users share video material, is still
used more by boys than girls – the Pew report found that they were twice as
likely to post videos online.
Yet women are starting slowly to make inroads. One of the top 50 most popular
contributors to YouTube is Bryony Matthewman, 24, the British artist and
graphic designer who is better known to her millions of fans as Paperlilies.
Her video sketches of impressions of damaged celebrity fodder such as Amy
Winehouse and Britney Spears have brought a celebrated female face to the
site.
“It is still quite awkward to admit to making videos online as a woman,” said
Matthewman.
“People’s immediate thought of a girl in an online video is ‘porn!’ so it’s
taking a while to get away from that stereotype.”
However, stereotypes are being thrown away every day in different digital
areas. A recent poll by Game-Vision showed that 30% more women bought
computer games in the six months to July 31, 2007, than in the same period
in 2006. The survey also found that there were more female owners of
Nin-tendo’s handheld DS console in the UK than men (54% against 46%).
Blogging used to be the preserve of men with obsessive interests in particular
subjects, notably sport, cars and politics, but young women are increasingly
entering this arena.
Kelly Needham, 21, a student in Newcastle, started posting her thoughts online
in her teens. She said that for her, as for many other young women, the blog
was a means of getting her opinions heard more easily. “It’s a way of
publishing who you are. In the real world a lot of people are inhibited.
They can be more confident online with their opinions,” she said.
“My personal blog gave me a lot more of a chance to express myself. It was the
most freedom I ever had.” YET while they are becoming the primary consumers
and producers of the internet world, young women are not yet translating
this dominance into financial gains.
“The majority of people behind the web, who programme sites and create the new
technologies, tend to be men for whatever reason,” said Matthewman. “Those
are the people at the back end of the web, who control it and who stand to
make money from it. More women may be using it now but they aren’t making
the money from it.”
There are, of course, exceptions. In Britain, Martha Lane Fox, the co-founder
of Lastminute.com, and Natalie Massenet, who set up the popular shopping
site Net-a-Porter, have both become multi-million-aires through their
web-savvyness. But many new internet opportunities in the current so-called
Web 2.0 era require real IT expertise and in this area women still lag
behind their male contemporaries.
Figures for female enrolment in IT degree courses remain low. While not as
pitiful as admissions for engineering, in the 2005-6 academic year there were
75,360 British male home students on computing courses at university,
compared with 23,370 women, according to the Higher Education Statistics
Agency.
This is a figure that depresses Sarah Blow, a 26-year-old software engineer
who is better known for her popular Girly Geekdom website and blog.
“Even though both my parents worked in IT I was told to look at marketing and
law by my school careers adviser,” she said. “[But] the message is slowly
getting across to girls that the industry isn’t all about that clapped-out
stereotype of geeky guys with glasses.”
Among the youngest girls there are signs that the message is working. A recent
survey by Tesco, which has a voucher scheme to provide computers for
schools, found that from as early as seven years old, girls are beating boys
when it comes to using computers. The research found that 44% of girls aged
7-16 were able to create a networking profile on the internet compared with
35% of boys; and 52% of girls knew how to download photographs from the
internet, compared with 44% of boys.
On the computer courses that he teaches at Middlesex University, White says
that women are beginning to outperform men.
“In actual fact [the courses] are oriented towards what women like doing. They
just don’t know that before they enrol. The last time I checked the figures,
female students were doing better than men in the courses,” he said.
He also noted that the proportion of female student numbers was improving as
well. “There would not have been any female students doing computing 20-30
years ago,” he said. WITH a new generation of young women who have grown up
with computers these figures will surely continue to rise. Yet still there
are entrenched attitudes to be overcome.
Back upstairs in Reshad’s bedroom she is giving her Bebo page another makeover
and uploading more photographs for her father to check out in LA. She says
she feels comfortable with technology.
“I understand a lot about computers because I spend a lot of time on them,”
she said.
However, this does not translate into an ambition to generate the software
that is so essential to her life: “Girls are creative, they are more into
history, English and art – it’s the boys who are more into the techie
things.”
Additional reporting: Morwenna Coniam
John, all this means is that you're going to the wrong sites. Try Daily Candy or Gawker, try BlogHer or Viewpoints. This is the classic situation where early adopters (geeky men, in this case) adopted first. The much larger markets are the majority adopters, addressed in this article.
Mike, Boston, MA
I visit plenty of popular sites like Slashdot, Digg, Thinkbroadband (to name a few), and women are as common as rocking horse droppings. Your claims that women are outperforming or taking over the net is just fantasy feminist fangirl propaganda.
John Greene, Wolverhampton,
I must disagree with your notion that women are becoming the new population on the internet. I do not think I am qualified as any sort of expert but I spend my fair share of excessive amounts of time on the internet. To say that girls are getting Myspaces and facebooks and other social networking accounts really does not say much. Internet culture at large has really discredited Myspace as mired up shell of its former intention and facebook is starting down that path as well. Also when measuring the growth of an internet population you cannot simply count the number of people. You must investigate traffic caused by that population and, as focused on social networking as the current news media may be, the current kings of traffic bandwidth are peer to peer file sharers. The mainstay of current internet culture is still on less than overt message boards and centered around very geeky themes, though it is not so gender biased as it used to be. Women are gaining but are far from the norm.
Erik, Chicago, Illinois