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Once the playground for young techie guys, the Internet in recent years has been dominated by women as the overall gender gap closed, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But Pew's analysis shows the emergence of new gender gaps, where young women, black women and older men are more likely to be online than their opposite sex peers. Further, Pew found that men and women use the Internet in different ways, paralleling traditional offline behavior. The study, "How Men and Women Use the Internet," was based on interviews with 6,403 randomly dialed telephone interviews conducted between January and June this year. The survey has a sampling error of less than plus or minus 2 percentage points. This Pew project has been measuring behavior on the Internet since 2000, but an earlier Pew program began following Web trends in 1995. Deborah Fallows, senior research fellow at Pew and author of the study, told the Chicago Sun-Times, "There has been a 'feminization' [of the Net] in the sense that women took a different fork in the Internet road from men. Men use and appreciate the Internet more for the experiences it offers -- to do things -- and women use it and appreciate it more for the human connections they build." Steve Jones, an Internet researcher and communication professor based at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said the report demonstrates that "Net users are not some kind of monolithic 'them' and the Internet is not just a giant mass medium. The Internet is a multi-medium, which men and women use differently." Fallows said women have been the major users of the Net since 2000. She said the latest survey showed that similar proportions of men and women go online -- 68 percent to 66 percent, respectively -- but the Net has more female users because women outnumber men slightly in the population. On the other hand, on a typical day men are more likely to go online. Among the new study's findings: *Younger women are more likely to go online than younger men. Eighty-six percent of women ages 18 to 29 go online compared with 80 percent of their male peers. *Older men are more likely to go online than older women. Thirty-four percent of men 65 and older go online compared with 21 percent of women in that age bracket. *Black women outdistance black men in Internet use: 60 percent of African American women are Net users compared with 50 percent of black men. *About two-thirds of Latino men and women are online, an 18 percent rise for women and a 14 percent increase for men over the past three years. *Money changes everything. Internet usage goes up with income: 90 percent of men and 95 percent of women in households earning $75,000 or more are online compared with 49 percent of men and 48 percent of women earning less than $30,000 a year. *Men feel more confident than women about their online research. Fifty-four percent of men and 40 percent women say they are self-confident researchers. *Women feel the online information glut more than do men: 24 percent of women and 19 percent of men say they are experiencing information overload. Fallows, a Chicago native, said more research will be needed to explain some of these findings. Jones, who is affiliated with Pew but wasn't involved in the new study, said Fallows' findings on young women build on his own studies of Internet use by college students, showing that women more than men tend to go online to play games and communicate with friends. "Women have a strong interest in communicating with one and another. It's an extension of the teenage girl hogging the telephone." Fallows said she was surprised by the surge in Internet use among black women. Over the past three years, 30 percent more of black women are online while usage among men has remained relatively the same. Fallows said this "curious" finding may relate to the nature of jobs black men and women have. Fallows expected that the Net would free the sexes to behave in "unstereotypical ways," such as men acting more "touch-feely" and women being more comfortable exploring new technologies. But she said online behavior reflects traditional offline behavior among the sexes. Women like to go online to use e-mail to nurture and build personal relationships, look for health information, get support for health and personal problems, and to pursue religious interests. Meanwhile, men go online to check the weather, read news, get do-it-yourself information, check sports scores, investigate products and download music. Fallows found that women like to use the Net to send e-mail and e-cards and are pulling ahead of men in use of instant messaging and text messaging on cell phones, while men are more likely to use online chats and discussion groups and to make Net-based phone calls. She said the survey may have implications for business, such as making software, spam filters and online transactions more "user friendly" to encourage women to be more willing to try new things online. Jones said the research suggests that Web developers should avoid "overpersonalizing" their sites and try to develop areas of special interest to men and women as well as other demographic groups. "These are lessons that other media, such as magazines, learned long ago," he said. |