June 1st, 2009

Twitter's puzzling gender gap and other anomalies . . .

Posted by Tom Foremski @ 11:18 pm

Categories: Culture

Tags: Women, Twitter, Gender And Diversity, Human Resources, Tom Foremski

A Harvard Business School study has found that men have more followers than women - reversing the gender ratio found on other social networks. And there are additional surprises:
New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets

Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women.

…This is intriguing, especially given that females hold a slight majority on Twitter: we found that men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%.

…Even more interesting is who follows whom. We found that an average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman. Similarly, an average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman. Finally, an average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity - both men and women tweet at the same rate.

…On a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know.

…A typical Twitter user contributes very rarely. Among Twitter users, the median number of lifetime tweets per user is one. This translates into over half of Twitter users tweeting less than once every 74 days.

…The top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production.

…This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network.

I have some possible explanations here, what are some of yours?