Women and Internet Usage

How Do Women Use The Internet?

The demographics of internet usage, especially with reference to the sexes, have been subject to great speculation ever since the advent of the internet.  Do men and women use internet the same way or differently? What do women think of the internet? How do they negotiate this space and how they use it? What is the internet being used for by women? What are women’s hopes, dreams and fears about the internet? A million significant questions to which there are no easy answers, if only because of the constantly evolving dynamics between the sexes. Most studies on the way men and women use the internet reveal that men are still first out of the blocks when it comes to trying out the newest innovations and latest technologies. They are also more demanding in their quest for internet activities; they log on more often and spend more time online.

Closing the Gender Gap

Recent trends in internet usage however indicate that although the percentage of women using the internet still lags slightly behind the percentage of men, the gender gap is slowly but surely closing up. Women are steadily catching up in overall use of the internet and they are framing their online experience with a greater emphasis on strengthening connections with other people. A recent Burst Media survey indicated that 66.1 of women claim their lives are likely to be disrupted if they had to do without internet access for even one week.

The Internet as a tool for Communicating

Women use the internet primarily as a form of communicating with one another without the constraints of space. More and more women of all races and all ages are logging on to cyber space both to communicate with family, friends and with other women’s organizations and also to look for information on a wide range of women’s issues. For most women, e-mail remains the core of their online experience. Women use email to write to family and friends about every topic under the sun. They share good news as well as their concerns; relate funny stories, forward jokes and even plan events over e-mail. Women use e-mail to nurture and maintain their relationships and will include a wider range of topics in their e-mails as opposed to men who use e-mail primarily to communicate officially with organizations of different types.  This connection between women on the internet not only serves to bond women together, it also reinforces the relationship between women and empowers them by allowing them to create online-communities. Several cyber-communities that have been created by women, started off by exchanging conversations on the internet.

The Internet as a Resource for Information

Women also use the internet to access information that may have previously been inaccessible to them for various reasons. Through the internet women can easily obtain essential information concerning legal rights, reproductive rights, health issues, family law and other pertinent issues. The resources for these often volatile issues can be assessed in privacy at any time that it is convenient and for any length of time that is necessary. Several sites offer not only general information to women about issues regarding sexual assault, domestic violence and date rape but also provide phone numbers and addresses of local sources that women can contact. Very often, the information contained on these websites serves to empower women simply by supplying essential knowledge, by providing a global viewpoint of these core issues and by offering unstinting support even across the miles. In essence women use the internet as a network of communication as well as a place to empower themselves and to redefine discourses by creating their own cyber-communities based on their own perceptions and experiences.