Gender differences in the use of Web 2.0 resources

Abstract

The continuous increase in the number of Internet users and the emergence of Web 2.0, has led many researchers to focus their studies on these resources. Gender studies are not an exception. Yet, few attempts have tried to identify gender differences regarding the use of Web 2.0 tools. The purpose of this study was to identify gender differences in the use of Web 2.0 resources reported in literature. There were found gender inequalities, such as (i) females use more online networks than males, and specially older ones; (ii) while girls use weblogs to reinforce pre-existing friendships, boys use them for “flirting” and making new friends, (iii) the percentage of female weblogs authors is much higher than that of male authors; still, boys are more likely to download music and video files; (iv) regarding wikis, males edit more than females, post more mentions to other participant’s posts and make more comments than do females overall, while female students show higher resource and wiki views, as well as uploaded documents; (v) women are more active and write more words in online discussion forums than males and (vi) men use more chats than women and both genders differ in discourse style; while women show more emotions, men tend to be judgmental and use more violent verbs.

Keywords

• Web 2.0
• Internet
• gender studies
• gender equity
• gender differences