I was playing with some old survey data the other day and found some interesting effects of life events on how men and women use technology. We asked about the number of people who had done various activities online in the last 6 months.
On the whole, the numbers for men and women for most activities were broadly equal. But for certain activities, the presence of children changed the picture completely. Take blogging. Among those in the pre-family lifestage, the proportions of men and women who were bloggers were about equal. If we now compare these figures to those who have children, the proportions who blog are similar for women, but men with children barely blog at all.
It’s a similar story with social networking sites. Mothers are almost as likely as not-yet-mothers to be active members of these sites. Fathers, on the other hand, just don’t seem to be as interested. Is this because mothers tend to have more time at home to spend on these sites? Given how much social networking usage seems to go on in offices, I doubt it. I think part of it is that mothers are more closely involved with their children’s social lives than fathers are, and so might have been persuaded to get a Bebo profile somewhere along the way. Might this also point to women becoming less set in their ways as they get older, perhaps again because they are around younger minds for longer?
Or perhaps it is simply a demographic effect of mothers generally being younger than fathers, and the difference in web 2.0 usage will disappear as younger cohorts come into parenthood and the fathers are equally tech-savvy as the mothers. This data is about a year old, and when I get a moment, I intend to check these results against more recent waves of the same survey to see if they show signs of shifting this way. [Disclosure: this data comes from (my employer) the Future Foundation's proprietary research.]
Finally, most people who have bet or gambled online are men without children. Most of them give up when they have kids, however. Young women are very unlikely to bet online, but when they have children, something seems to happen, and they become three times as likely to have a flutter.
All of the above are just observations from the data. I’d love to know your hypotheses for why older women seem to be more interested in technology than older men.
I wonder if the Mom’s who continue to blog after having children are not simply responding to the isolation, consufion, and redefinition of self that occurs for women when they have a baby?
Women who have a developed career can often see this as a crisis moment and find terrfic solace in the blogosphere since their husband is often not going through anything similar. This might also explain her willingness to try new adult things such as gambling.
Love your blog, by the way, and I’ve been lurking for quite a while.
Christina at Geekgirlfriends.com
AWESOME blog. So insightful. I wonder why it gets unnoticed. I study Advertising in Perú and it’s kind of sad beacause nobody cares about technology or the reality of women consumers. Anyway, I’m a big fan.
I hope we can meet someday to exchange ideas.