Last week brought a
report from Forrester suggesting that Foursquare, a leader in location-based social networks, is disproportionately male, with a male-female ratio of nearly four-to-one. As one might expect, this
excited some comment in online forums. In addition to potentially discouraging single men from joining, much of the buzz around these findings seemed to imply, in a vague buzz-y way, that the lack of
ladies -- or glut of guys, I guess -- somehow bodes ill for Foursquare's future as a marketing platform.
I have two (not necessarily consistent) observations about this: First, why should a
site's gender proportions matter to marketers? Second, the proportions will probably adjust to be more reflective of the general population over the next couple years, as Foursquare's head of business
development, Tristan Walker, has already suggested.
On the first point, the gender make-up of a social network's user base, as with any audience, really only matters to marketers in that
they need to make sure they are targeting the right people in the right place. Virtually every other medium delivers audiences that are at least sometimes segmented by gender -- e.g. Maxim vs.
Glamour, Spike vs. Lifetime -- so why shouldn't some online social networks?
Moving on to the second, somewhat contradictory point, I doubt the alleged gender imbalance will be a lasting
phenomenon, judging by the historical development of the Internet over the last two decades. The same trend has been evident pretty much everywhere you look: each new online activity has been
dominated at first by a relatively small number of young, affluent, tech-savvy men, but the proportion of women rises rapidly as the activity scales up.
I'll throw out a handful of examples,
starting with the Internet itself, where the proportion of women in the U.S. online population rose from a mere 5% in 1994 to 39% in 1998 and 51% now, according to various figures from Pew and Georgia
Tech. Zooming in on specific activities, check out online shopping: in 2000 45% of all online shoppers were female, rising to 51% in 2008, according to figures from Pew and Greenfield Online. Or
online banking: in 2001 19.3% of male Internet users said they used online banking, compared to 16.5% of female Internet users. Just four years later, adoption by the two genders was equal at 41%
each.