A recent study by the Harvard Business School found that men are far more likely to follow another man than a woman on Twitter. Also, while men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.
What’s interesting about the finding is that Twitter behavior seems to be a reverse of other social networks. On a typical social network like Facebook, most of the activity is focused around women – men tend to follow women they do and do not know, and women follow other women they do know.
So why do men seem to rule Twitter? One theory is that while Twitter is text-driven, other social networks like MySpace tend to be focused around images. Photo sharing is believed to be the biggest activity on Facebook. It’s possible that women are more adept at posting interesting images while men provide good sound (or text) bites.
It’s also possible that we’re simply programmed to think men produce more authoritative texts. If all Twitterers used gender-neutral user names perhaps the difference between the sexes would be reduced.
For more info on the Harvard study, check out the New York Times’ Economix blog.
image credit: carrotcreative
June 6th, 2009 at 2:02 am
Because I want to read news and meaningful, useful information/analysis about the world around us – not a series of “updates” about how someone’s day is going or what the weather is like.