Girls and young woman are now the most prolific web users

The internet began as an almost exclusively male preserve. Now young women, from primary school age upwards, are now making it their own

This is the claim made in the The Times Online . The article goes on to say that ….

‘A recent study by the Pew Internet Project in America on teens in social media found that blogging growth among teenagers is almost entirely fuelled by girls, whom it describe as a new breed of “super-communicators”. Some 35% of girls, compared with 20% of boys, have blogs; 32% of girls have their own websites, against 22% of boys. ‘

I have spent some time on Google Reader having a look at the blog posts by my class over the last month. Here’s the breakdown:

• There were 73 blog posts by girls and 7 posts by boys
• the 73 ‘girl’ posts were made by 12 different girls (the biggest contribution from an individual was 20 posts, most contributed between 5 and 8 posts, a few have only put on 1 or 2 posts)
• the 7 ‘boy’ posts were made by 5 of the boys. One boy contributed 3 posts, the others contributed 1 each

I haven’t yet analysed the types of posts.

I also checked my class gmail account where the comments arrive for moderation. Altogether in the same period there were 128 comments. I know that quite a few of the  children leave comments on the AllStars individual blogs, but I’ve no easy way of  gathering this information … maybe Kim could help 🙂

Here’s the breakdown for the Comments information that I do have:

• 100 of the comments were made on the girls’ blogs
• 28 of the comments were made on the boys’ blogs
• of the 28 comments made on the boys’ blogs, 8 were made by boys (and 3 of those were by AllStars’ boys)

More from The Times article :

“If you look at young girls, they do more communicating than young boys and that’s what they are doing on the web,” said Professor Anthony White, a lecturer in the school of computing science at Middlesex University. “It’s just natural for them.”

Professor White reports that in the computer courses he teaches at Middlesex University,  women are beginning to outperform men.

He is also quoted as saying:

‘In actual fact [the courses] are oriented towards what women like doing. They just don’t know that before they enrol. The last time I checked the figures, female students were doing better than men in the courses’

Thanks to John for his great post that helped me find this article through ScotEdublogs news. I now have the site added to my Google Reader account 🙂