Selected news stories about the Pew Internet Project and articles citing our data.
Women narrow online gender divide
12/29/2005 | 
Coverage
Chris Cobbs , Orlando Sentinel, Business
'“Bernadine Douglas goes online to maintain her fitness program while her husband, Garth, uses the computer to keep up with fantasy football and track strategy in paintball.
The 30-something Clermont couple represent the ever-shifting face of the Internet, where men and women flock in almost equal percentages but for very different reasons.
Those reasons -- plus more details about U.S. Internet usage -- are part of a new study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C., that has studied online behavior for nearly six years.
Analyzing data from more than 75,000 interviews for past surveys, the study found the digital gender divide narrowing, with 68 percent of adult men and 66 percent of women going online. By contrast, the gap was slightly larger in 2002: 61 percent versus 57 percent.
But the survey, released today, showed that both sexes carve out distinct patterns of Web usage, with women taking a people-oriented approach and men taking an action-oriented one -- behaviors that mirror their real-world interests.
"It would have been wonderful to find people behaved differently online -- if men were more girlie or women were braver or more techie. But what I found was that online behavior closely mirrors offline behavior."
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