Women Are From Venus, Men Are From The Twitterverse

By Eyder Peralta

Most of the Web has been talking about a Harvard study that stated only 10 percent of Twitter users actually Tweet. But, I found the gender findings much more interesting.

The study sampled 300,542 Twitter accounts and found that:

A man follows a lot more men than women (65 percent to 35 percent.)

A woman is more likely to follow a man (56 percent) and is more likely to be followed by a woman (52 percent).

Maybe I'm naïve, but I always thought of the Internet as the great equalizer, a place where the constraints of race and gender in the real world eased a little.

Shireen Mitchell, an active woman in social media and executive director of Digital Sistas, didn't laugh at me when I told her that. But she very pointedly said that yes, the hierarchy, or patriarchy, of the real world transfers to Twitter.

To her this study didn't say anything new. Using anecdotal evidence, she says, female tweets are retweeted (or forwarded) less and many times without attribution.

Mitchell, who's on a lot of new-media panels in conferences, says she asks during presentations if participants' online social network is any more diverse than the people they hang around with in real life. Almost invariably, she's found people hang out with like people.

Jill Foster, a Twitter power-user and editor at Women Grow Business, doesn't quite believe the numbers. She thinks Twitter is still young, so the sample reflects a "snap shot" not an "enduring pattern."

But 300,000 users is a significant sample.

Mitchell is willing to concede that this may be behavioral. Men are more obsessed with the amount of followers and women are more concerned about the quality of the relationship.

As broad a stroke as that is, I can see that.

But let's pretend that this study does prove that real-world bias and real-world prejudices do make it onto Web communities. Why would they? Why wouldn't we instead come up with some new, 21st century reasons to differentiate each other?

I think I was surprised by this study, because a part of me still thinks of the internet like it was when I was in high school -- text-heavy and anonymous. I was surprised because part me thought of the internet as MySpace, where few use their real name, when it's already transitioned into Facebook, where most people post their name and their real pictures.

And maybe this is a simplistic analysis, but whether with avatars or thumbnail pictures of ourselves, we're constantly making the Web a reflection of our everyday world -- warts and all.