“As recent as 1997, boys and men made up three-quarters of Internet users,” (Chabrow, 2005), however today men and women access the Internet equally and Chabrow even claims that women are becoming the more dominate user in
Prior to researching information for this blog, I decided to do my own Internet experiment by posting the question on Facebook, “do women and men approach the Internet differently?” The responses I received from my friends, both men and women, overwhelmingly indicated that men use the Internet mostly for searching, whereas women use it to communicate. For example, my sister-in-law, Shelley Berman stated, “without knowing the real statistics of it all, my guess is that women and men use it equally for knowledge...but I would bet that more women than men use it for entertainment and connecting with others socially.” This difference in the way men and women approach the Internet is primarily due to their innate differences in gender, which is “a socially constructed means of categorizing people, usually as masculine or feminine, and assigning particular ideals and characteristics to those categorizations” (Thurlow, Lengel, & Tomic, 2004, p.130).
The research provided by Kennedy, Wellman and Klement (2003), validates the claim that men and women use the Internet as an extension of their gender roles in the home. In a typical American family men are still seen as the primary breadwinner and therefore, their use of the Internet to search for information that may improve themselves or the family along with “more isolated recreational activities” (Kennedy et al., 2003, p.90) fits with this gender role. Similarly, even though women may work outside of the home, they are still the primary “childcare provider, kinkeeper and networker” (Kennedy et al., 2003, p.90) in the family who is responsible for maintaining relationships with relatives, friends and neighbors, therefore, most women use the Internet to communicate with others through email, social networking sites, blogs and chat rooms. Surprisingly, I have found these gender roles to be true in my own family, for my husband recently attended his twentieth high school reunion and even though I was not there and had never met his classmates before, he told them to look me up on Facebook as I would be keeping everyone up to date with my pregnancy and eventually the baby. My husband does not care to spend his time networking on the Internet, but he is more then happy to research the specifications of baby items such as cribs, strollers and car seats because he can compare the quality and price of each brand, which he thinks will help us make a better purchasing decision.
One specific example of how women and men approach the Internet differently with regards to gender roles is their participation in computer games for entertainment. Most men play computer games where they can perform an action in a “linear” format where you “complete a level and then you go to the next level and the next level and you win” (FindingDulcinea, 2009), as Ariel Aberg-Riger of Fourth Story Media explains in a panel discussion on how men and women use the Internet differently. This type of game re-enforces the breadwinner mentality of the male gender that it is necessary to climb the corporate ladder in order to succeed. Since “the majority of the computer games today contain exaggerated representations of gender – the spaces within the games are masculine,” (Thurlow et al., 2004, p.131), most women do not have an interest in playing these types of games. Through the female gender role as a communicator, women cannot relate to the concepts, characters or the end goal of these male-dominated games and prefer a different experience as explained further by Aberg-Riger:
“with girls it is much more nebulous, like they kind of want to be involved in the world, and they want to see the world respond to them, um, and their interested in the clues and their interested in the mystery and their interested in these things happening, um, but they more want just to live it and share it with their friends and I think that’s a big difference in entertainment at least” (FindingDulcinea, 2009).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NwHgr7tcEU
The women who do play computer games are more intrigued with character building games that involve a community such as Farmville on Facebook where they are able to interact with other players to work together for an end result.
Another example of how gender roles affect the use of the Internet is the perception that men are more likely to use it for sexual gratification than women. For example, in response to my question on Facebook, I did have one man, Scott Hancock, respond by writing “I don’t know. Do women like porn? I kid. I kid.” Even though he was making a joke, there was another man who continued with the joke in his own response as it seemed to be a known fact that this is what men search for on the Internet and women do not. It is true that men may be “more likely to report consumption of pornographic material than are women” (Bryant, 2009, p.345), but women do look for sexual material on the Internet. Just as their gender role suggests, women are more likely to “seek out chat rooms and erotic narratives, and are less likely to masturbate to online sexual materials” (Bryant, 2009, p.345), whereas men are more likely to search for an immediate response of arousal from visual images which can be used masturbatory aids. Even while displaying sexual behaviors on the Internet women are communicating through words and trying to make a connection with another person as opposed to searching for an immediate solution like a man.
Gender roles and their affect on the use of the Internet are real and should be studied further by scholars and businesses. The fact that I first chose to post a question on Facebook regarding this topic to gain insight on the topic from my friends fits within my gender role of a woman as a communicator, as opposed to a searcher. However, I am not the only woman who turns to Facebook or other social media sites first when seeking information, for there are “42 million women in the United States (roughly 53% of the 79 million adult women in the United States who use the Internet) that participate in social media at least weekly” (Campbell, 2009) as found in a 2009 survey by BlogHer and iVillage and Compass Partners. The survey also explains that while Facebook and MySpace receive the most use by women, more women go to blogs for information on business, politics, cars and technology. Therefore, it is important for all companies and non-profit organizations to understand the differences in how women and men approach the Internet based on their gender roles to ensure that they are going to attract the correct audience through their marketing campaigns and keep them as loyal consumers or supporters.
References
Berman, S. (2009, November 13). Facebook [Msg 5]. Message posted to
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/elise.berman?ref=profile
Campbell, A. (2009, May 10). 42 Million
Influential. Small Business Trends. Retrieved November 9. 2009 from http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/05/42-million-women-use-social-media-blogs.html
Chabrow, B. (2005, April 7). More American Women Than Men Go Online. Information Week.
Retrieved November 6, 2009 from http://www.inforamtionweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=160502074
FindingDulcinea. (2009). Pt. 9 How Do Men and Women Use the Web Differently? - Internet
Week 2009 - Beyond Facebook. Retrieved November 8, 2009 from
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NwHgr7tcEU
Hancock, S. (2009, November 13). Facebook [Msg 2]. Message posted to
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/elise.berman?ref=profile
Kennedy, T., Wellman, B. and Klement, K. (2003). Gendering the Digital Divide. IT&SOCIETY,
1(5), 72-96.
Thurlow, C., Lengle, L. and Tomic, A. (2004). Computer Mediated Communication: Social
Interaction and the Internet.
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