• December 29, 2005

Women and men go online in almost equal proportions, but what they do on the Web is another matter entirely. Men are more likely than women to check weather and news, download music, and get financial information; women are more likely to look for health and medical information, use e-mail, and--clichéd though it may be--seek out maps and directions online than are men. Those are some of the findings of a new study that examines gender and Internet use, by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The report, "How Women and Men Use the Internet," found that 68 percent of men were Internet users as of September, compared with 66 percent of women. Those figures represent gains for women from March of 2000, when a previous Pew study found that 49 percent of men and 44 percent of women used the Web. For the report, Pew looked at several separate telephone surveys it conducted between March 2000 and September 2005; the total number of respondents in 2005 alone was 6,403. -- Wendy Davis