DIGILIFE | Arab men and women e-qual?

It's a known fact that, so far, male Arab users registered on the region's top sites outnumber females by, typically, three to one. Although some people may use this fact to claim that only one quarter of Internet users in the Arab world are female, that is not an accurate statement.

After all, women's interests as Internet users may lie elsewhere, other than the typical sites in the Arab World. Seeing as a comprehensive, methodological study, covering Arab countries, has not been conducted; it's really anybody's guess how many Arab women are online.

However, with young women and men today equally enjoying Internet access at home and at school, you can safely say that the 'new generation' of Arabs have gender parity.

The question becomes more complicated when we look at women of working, or married, age. Let's be honest about this. Married women in a typical Arab family, especially in the Gulf States, do not go to work. This means that their husbands may be using the Internet at the office, while they don't have access to the Internet at home. That can skew the numbers towards more male users of the Internet, in the age group of married men and women.

Also, the nature of Internet use differs as the interests of each gender differ. How that impacts the number of hours spent on the Internet and activity/inactivity of each gender remains to be seen.

First, let's establish the areas in which they probably use the Internet equally. Email and messaging seem to be areas in which both women and men are highly involved. In fact, and excuse this stereo-type, you'd expect women to be more involved than men in online chatting and discussions.

So, maybe, that's an area in which women supersede men.Onto Internet content- by which we mean the nature of the information which men or women would seek on the Internet- the decisive factor here would be what's available out there in Arabic. Are the popular Arabic sites offering primarily political/economic/sports news?

Please excuse me again for another stereo-typed conclusion, but such content would favor a higher percentage of males; particularly sports which is the strongest type of content in the Middle East. An Arab man will visit sports site daily, and sometimes several times a day to see the scores and read the news.

Economic and business sites present another example of a male-dominated audience, with the reason we mentioned before - the percentage of men who work is much higher than women- and you may add to that the percentage of men who make financial or investment decisions on behalf of the family is higher than women who do so.

Women-focused sites, on the other hand, are few but starting to emerge. They cover subjects like fashion, health, fitness, make-up, relationships and women-targeted products.

The number of visitors and page views of such sites is quite impressive, and this has drawn the attention of many of the male-focused portals that a huge potential lies in females!

Until we get a conclusive study, here’s a prediction for you. Half the Internet society is an untapped market, but not for long!

zanasser@gmail.com