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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.
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% more followers than
women. The study also revealed that men also have more reciprocated
relationships, in which two users follow each other. 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%.
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% 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.
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 Page(s) 1
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