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Women Now Outnumber Men Online

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the hello-ladies dept.

miller60 writes "There are now more American women than men using the Internet, according to a new study from the Pew Center on the Internet and American Life on gender and use of the Net. While a slightly larger percentage of men than women are online (68 percent vs 66 percent), the larger population of American women tips the balance. Other findings: younger women and black women outpace their male peers by larger margins than the wider population."

3 of 255 comments (clear)

  1. It's called sampling by wmajik · · Score: 4, Informative

    Ok, I'm not one to defend surveys much if at all given that many of them are biased and not done correctly, but the reasoning you mentioned is simply flawed. Surveys are not meant to be done on the entire population, because polling 280 million Americans would be an impossible and unfeasible task.

    Surveys take a sample of the population to be polled and use that as a representative measure of the rest of the population. The sample size then is given a confidence interval of +/- percentage points (usually 5%) that indicate the accuracy of the poll, within a reasonable standard deviation. In English, this means that polls aren't 100% accurate, but a properly done survey should be accurate within 5% of the acutal figure the majority of the time.

    Selecting a random sample from the population is often the hardest part of any survey, but can be done correctly. To flat out say that using samples means that the data is irrelevant is completely inaccurate.

    /rant

  2. Re:They surveyed ~0.0023% of the population! by will_die · · Score: 4, Informative

    Please read a little about statistical analysis.
    Using your population number 280000000 and 6,403 people survayed that gives a 95% confidence (which is about the norm for this type of study) that the survey answers are correct and apply to people who were not surveyed. This is with an margin of error of 1.22% which means that survey results may vary by 1.22% in either direction. This is all provided that the people surveyed where a random sample of the US population.

  3. Using the Internet Differently by StonePiano · · Score: 5, Informative

    Check this BBC article.
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4555370.stm
    Apparently men and women use the Internet for different priorities.

    Could this suggest that there is actually a difference in the genders?
    The mystery thickens...