• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, September 14, 2011

"Women be [accessin' Facebook via mobile devices]," if I may paraphrase Sinbad rather inelegantly. My new stand-up bit on gender differences is based on the latest data from Nielsen documenting the top Android apps for men, women, and the overall population.

The total proportion of men and women Android users who also use the Android marketplace is high in both cases -- 90.6% for men and 90.5% for women. After this, however, the genders' usage habits diverge markedly. As my Sinbad doppelganger notes, the top app for women is Facebook, with 81% active reach among female Android users. Meanwhile men be navigatin': the top Android app is Google Maps, with 77.1% active reach among male Android users, saving them from the mortification of having to ask for directions.

Interestingly, Facebook is not a particularly high priority for male Android users: the second most-popular app for men is Gmail (as it is for women, with active reach of 75.5% among men and 73.4% among women). Next for men comes Google Search, with active reach of 72.4% among male Android users -- and only then do we come to Facebook, with active reach of 66.9%.

The third and fourth most-popular Android apps for female Android users are Google Maps, with 71.9% active reach, and Google Search, with 71.3% active reach. In fifth place for both genders is YouTube, but only after a sharp fall-off in active reach: 53.7% of male Android users have availed themselves of the YouTube app, compared to 48.7% among women.

Lower down the totem pole, both genders had roughly comparable usage rates for Angry Birds (27.3% for men, 24.2% for women) and Pandora Radio (24.4% and 23.2%, respectively).