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Women Now Outnumber Men Online
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."
black women have surged online in the last three years
All kinds of women have been "surging" on the internet for a lot more than three years.
Well, certain types of women.
"I am a...
o woman
o man
o geek
o Cowboy Neal"
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Just write word 'sex' to google, and you can see by the links women outnumbering men easily.
Jesus, what a silly comment.
)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_survey
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics
Oh sure, they say they're women.
This is the internet, the place where women are women, and some men are women too.
liqbase
However, I have my own doubts about correct this research is -- All that is fine, but any research that doesn't mention porn must be flawed
These results might have caught my eye more if phrased in the reverse:
About a third of the population does not ever use the internet.
Even in the 18-29 age range its about 1 in 5 who are not online.
Even 0.0023% of the population can give a surveyor an accurate result. It all depends on the way the population was sampled. Sampling can be a science in itself though. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(statistics)
You'd discover that 91% of the American population is dating CowboyNeal.
There are *billions* of women on the internet. .jpg ...
The catch is, their names all end in
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.
/rant
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.
According to CNN this wonderfully unbiased article's research was scientifically conducted in an IRC sex chat channel over a period of six months only on Friday nights.
Polls comparing the average behaviour of men and women are boring and useless. Frankly, who gives a damn what the differences between the average man and average woman is? Someone who is average, I guess...
What a pity someone doesn't look at the differences in the distribution of how men and women use the net. Here's my guess: the distibution of men who use the net is probably much wider than the distribution of women, that is, there are probably more male the female total power net geeks, and also more men than women who never use the net at all.
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.
"...the larger population of American women tips the balance."
But does this mean that there are more of them numerically, or that they're so large that they just tip the balance easier? This was rather ambiguous, and I refuse to read TFA to find the answer.
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.
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...
The blurb was misleading. I think they're actually referring to the mass of women online, not the number. I'll clarify by slightly editing the quote. ObFatties:
The least likely to go on line were young and single. The most likely to go on line were married people with children. So: if you aren't tied down, there are better things to do with your life than going on the internet. Once you are tied down then the internet is a viable alternative to having a life.
For instance, it says that 21% of males visited adult websites
79% of men are liars!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Good point. Ok, we'll let the cute ones use it. And the ones who put out. But that's it! Oh, and Sal's girlfriend too. Sorry Sal.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
That the "hot 18 y/o girl" they were talking to online may not be exactly what they're expecting.... :)
While several of the stories (like this one on /.) are saying a slightly higher percentage of women now use the 'net, the first bullet point on The Pew site says "The percentage of women using the internet still lags slightly behind the percentage of men." Later in their summary Pew gives the bland tag news sources probably reacted to: "In most categories of internet activity, more men than women are participants, but women are catching up. "
The report itself is far more wide-ranging, and most of its interesting content gets left out of the usual suspects. I mean, parents are more likely to be online than nonparents -- 80% to 60%, which is a BIG difference. And so on. Even dramatic stuff gets discarded in favor of a horse-race-between-the-sexes thing, here. And I'll bet Pew phrased their own headline as a gender gap thing as a way of getting the attention of news sources, too -- the problem perpetuates itself.
Why is it that general news sources touch on only one or two aspects of something like this, but the original source's press release is much richer in the same space? It's like the whole "force a dialectic on the story even if there isn't one" thing is causing reporters to discard tons of primary information to sell a faked-up conflict that isn't there. (The more tabloid a source is, the worse it gets, too. Fox makes a hell of a living pimping every story up like this.)
In a reporting world like that, reporters aren't being asked to turn stories on their heads. They're just regurgitating press releases and reinforcing stereotypes.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I don't intend this as a flame, but give me a break. In nearly every area of life women differ from men. This is not a bad thing (I can't imagine being married to someone like me!), but it flies in the face of a segment of society that wants to believe that all gender differences are learned behavior and have no basis in genetics (nurture over nature).
Anyone who has both sons and daughters knows they are different, no matter how hard you try to androgenize them.
We need to get over ourselves and realize that difference does not equate to inferiority.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Nevermind the net - the whole world stops a short distance beyond the USA borders and if you would try to go beyond, you'll fall off the edge. Here, there be dragons...
Oh well, what the hell...
And just how big is the rock that the rest of these people are living under?
I think e-mail is slowly dying actually. A lot of kids don't really use it instead preferring to use instant messenger. If a kid has their own computer with broadband access, that stays on 24x7, why not just use IM?
Spam really hurts the usefulness of e-mail for a lot of users. Personally, I've reduced my personal e-mail account to just notification from various things I'm involved in (school, bills, etc.).
The thing I like so much about IM is that only people who I've explicitly allowed to contact me can actually contact me. This means no spam. With logging, and grep, it's just as useful a communications history as e-mail.
Am I the only that is amazed? (or read the full survey!) at this line that says:
Order from Spam: 6% of online men. 5% of online women.
5%, even with a margin of error is still a lot. But i know that it is probably true. At a previous business that wasn't doing spam but were sending small email campaigns we were estimating a return rate of about 3%.
I just think this number is scaringly high... the reason spam works, spammers still have work, and my 6 years old email address receives over 500 spams a day!
so, yes, am I the only one amazed by this? I would have like to have more question on this topic, like what do you buy from spam? Are you satisfied with it? How often do you buy from spam? etc...
Sounds just like AOL in the old days... 75% of the women were really men.
I do!
Oh wait, fuck! You tricked me!