Women : the dominant force in social networks

Online reputation company Rapleaf recently published a study on gender and age in social network users.

The study was made using the public available data gathered from the social web on hundreds of millions of people

Interestingly, one point highlighted by the study is that women outnumber men on most social networks (with the notable exception of LinkedIn and Flickr).

Sex ratio is significantly biases toward young women (14-24) on most social networks.

If a point is above the dashed line at 1.0 it means that there are more women than men, and vice versa.

It is clear that social networks can be divided into 3 categories:

1. the vast majority of social networks exhibit the same pattern than myspace or facebook

2. bebo or myyearbook shows a sex ratio bias whatever the age of the users. Those social networks seem to be mainly populated by women (myyearbook could even be seen as a female only network)

3. linkedin and perfspot can be viewed as two “outliers” in this study, showing a sex ratio bias toward male whatever the age - except for teenagers on linkedin. At least linkedin is more business focused.

We can see also that there is a small sex ratio bias toward men for 30-40 year old demographic

However, this tendency is reversed just after 40 years old.

It is interesting and also funny to note that this pattern is generally the same in dating networks, where there are more men looking for women for 30-40 year old demographic and vice versa after 40 years.

Finally, note also the significant enrichment of men for 60-80 year old demographic.

Interesting hey, there really is a digital gender divide!