Women Dominate Social Networking Sites

More factoids from the recently released study from comScore titled Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet.

Globally, females spend more time on sites

Globally, women demonstrate higher levels of engagement with social networking sites. Although women account for 47.9% of total unique visitors to the social networking category, they consume 57% of pages and account for nearly 57% of total minutes spent on these sites.

Women spend significantly more time on social networking sites than men, with women averaging 5.5 hours per month compared to men’s 4 hours.

Social networking sites reach a higher percentage of women than men globally, with 75.8% of all women online visiting a social networking site in May 2010 versus 69.7% of men. 

Women most active in Latin America, North America

Social Networking’s reach among women is highest in Latin America where it reached 94.1% of females online, and in North America where it reached 91.0% of females. Europe saw 85.6% of its female online population visit a social networking site in May 2010, while in Asia Pacific — where parts of the region still face low broadband penetration and site restrictions — reported a 54.9% reach.

Other differences in shopping, video, health and mobile:

• Although men are in the majority across the global Internet, women spend about 8% more time online, averaging 25 hours per month on the Web
• Globally, women spend 20% more time on Retail sites overall than men.
• In the U.S., women are more avid online buyers than men, with 12.5% of female Internet users making an online purchase in February 2010, compared to 9.3% of men
•  Health sites show some of the largest overall differences in reach between female and male, with a nearly 6-point gap between global women and men
•  In most countries, women spend far less time watching online video than men, but women spend a much higher share of their time watching videos on YouTube than men
•  In both the U.S. and Europe, smartphone usage is dominated by men with both markets experiencing close to a 60/40 split in smartphone adoption between the genders