While the early days of the Internet were almost exclusively the domain of men, today young women have risen to become one of its largest audience segments — and its most active users — as they pursue their social lives via cyberspace.
Twelve-year-old Clover Reshad is a typical example. She uses her computer to keep up with homework, monitor popular social networking sites, instant message her friends and family and to shop online. She feels her computer is a vehicle for communication as well as entertainment, similar to a mobile phone or television.
And she's not alone. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, 64 percent of online teens age 12-17 engage in online content creation — and girls account for the bulk of it.
Thirty-five percent of all teen girls reportedly run their own blog, compared with 20 percent of boys. Fifty-four percent of girls post photos online, compared with 40 percent of boys. Numbers might be higher were it not for one factor: parental consent.
"There are a few girls at school who don't use Bebo and Facebook, but it's not because they don't want to — it's because their parents won't let them," Reshad told The Times Online. "I do feel sorry for them."
Video, it seems, is more popular with boys than with girls, however, as boys post nearly twice as many videos online (19 percent vs. 10 percent), as do girls — a usage statistic that may be driven by boys' interests in technology and the gadgetry required to produce video clips.
But many women are embracing video on the web.
One such user is 24-year-old British artist Bryony Matthewman, known as 'Paperlilies' on YouTube. She is among the site's top 50 contributors, performing impressions of celebrities such as Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears.
"It is still quite awkward to admit to making videos online as a woman," Matthewman said. "People's immediate thought of a girl in an online video is 'porn,' so it's taking a while to get away from that stereotype."
It's not just that younger female users are dominating the web, but how and why they're doing it that can provide insight for online marketers wishing to fine-tune their offerings.
For example, the Pew survey revealed that younger users are not only interested in creating and sharing content, but in participating in conversations about that content, with around half (47 percent) of online teens having posted photos in public areas online, and 89 percent of those teens reporting having received comments on the images at least "some of the time."
The "public area" distinction is an important one, as many teens restrict the sharing of their content creations to invited friends or family using protected "member's areas" —planting the seeds of acceptance for premium, restricted-access content offerings.
The Pew report also identified a subset of teens that they call "super-communicators" with a variety of communication options at their disposal, including landline telephones, cell phones, texting, social network sites, instant messaging and email. Representing around 28 percent of the teen population, these users tend to be older girls.
Internet research company Hitwise has seen similar statistics, finding in a January report that 55 percent of British social networking site visitors are women. Nielsen Online found that 17 percent of social networking site users are 18-24-year-old women, compared with 12 percent of men in the same age group.
As for why young women are flocking to the Internet, the answer is a simple one: gossip.
"Girls use the Internet for gossiping and finding things out about friends and people you know," Reshad said. "Boys use it more for useful things like games."
The experts agree. "The Internet is a very expressive medium and you're looking at times in a girl's life when they are very socially expressive," John Horrigan of the Pew Internet Project said. "The Internet, and social networking particularly, enables that need."
"If you look at young girls, they do more communicating than young boys, and that's what they are doing on the web," Anthony White, a computing science professor at Middlesex University, said. "It's just natural for them."
One website operator warns against the oversimplification of user motivation, and points to differences in user activities between girls and boys. Matthew Bagwell is the editor of My Kinda Place, a website targeting girls, and Monkey Slum, a similar site for teen boys.
"Girls consume online very differently to boys," Bagwell told The Times Online. "Monkey Slum forums are just dead; on My Kinda Place the forums are extremely popular. Girls will browse, take a real journey around the site. Social networking has really captured a young female audience."
Bagwell feels that girls are more open to communicating, have longer attention spans and more varied interests than do boys and that these factors need to be considered when developing content offerings.
"We have to be inventive and diverse in our female content," Bagwell said. "Boys are easier. They will download pictures from galleries, viral ads and videos, but they're in and out again."
While the very-young adult demographic is not targeted by legitimate adult websites, forward-thinking operators will find value in understanding the habits, needs and user-experience expectations of tomorrow's consumers who are now driving the web.
