What Web 2.0 teaches us about gender

BANGALORE, INDIA: According to various studies, including a study by online reputation company Rapleaf, women outnumber men convincingly in most social networking sites, including the top ones. While it does not look surprising in case of mostly social social sites such Facebook and Myspace, even in the somewhat nerdish Twitter, women come on top.

According to the latest data available, these three are the top three social networking sites in the world. The only major networking site that is an exception to this is LinkedIn, which is a very organized, old-worldly business networking site and hence its user base is a reflection of the corporate world, which, as a matter of fact, is still dominated by men.

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However, what is more interesting and can provide answers to many of the gender issues in the workplace (and even contribute to the traditional men-women difference debates) is the results of a recent study by Harvard Business Publishing which reveals how the two sexes use Twitter.

The group examined the activity of a random sample of 300,000 Twitter users to find out how people are using the service. It found that though men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15 percent more followers than women. The study also revealed that men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other.

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This follower split suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or have more stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships. And this, despite its finding that men comprise just 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55 percent.

The study also found out that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman, whereas an average woman is 25 percent more likely to follow a man than a woman. These results, the study said, cannot be explained by different tweeting activity as it found that both men and women tweet at the same rate.

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This throws an interesting finding. This study as well as many others have found out that in contrast to other social networks, Twitter resembles a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network. Women are at their best when it comes to networking for the sake of communicating their feeling with their peers rather than communication for the purpose of communicating a message.

As a fairly regular user of Facebook, I can vouch that most of the mens postings are not about their own life but about what is happening around; women almost always write about what is happening in their life and seeking/providing suggestions from/to those in their network.

Those planning and driving gender diversity programs in corporates need to be sensitive to this fact. For example, in large groups, as in the IT services firms, the way women would approach someone superior for their problems would be very different from the way men would. As the Twitter lesson shows, men do not mind being followers as long as they can build a set of followers. Women do not mind if they are following or followed as long as they can share.

In the fairly democratic social networking sites, it happens automatically. In the hierarchical corporate world, they have to be proactively encouraged. Only then can we think of a level playing field. Todays enterprises areand I am not saying by designstructured in a way that suit men. Unless that is changed, high pitch marketing wont help the cause of true gender diversity.

Shyamanuja Das

The author is Editor of Dataquest. shyamanujad@cybermedia.co.in