Net Results: In cyberspace, no one may know you're a dog, but it's depressingly easy to tell if you are a man or a woman, depending on the internet sites you visit, writes Karlin Lillington.
Women - oh, how I hate to type this sentence - apparently visit the nappy site Huggies.com more than any other place on the web. Nappies! And here I was hoping we might be lured to, oh, I don't know, The New York Times, Epicurious.com, Amazon, New Scientist, or a travel site.
But Nappies! So says international internet ratings company Nielsen/Net Ratings, anyway. Though I suspect that women go to Huggies.com not for advice on baby wipes and nappies, but because Huggies have created a centre there for parenting advice.
Surprisingly perhaps, Oprah's www.oxygen.com doesn't even get a look-in on the list. Instead, the second most popular site is that of psychological treaclemeister Dr Phil, Drphil.com.
I just hate that American thing of calling celebrity doctors by their first name: Dr Phil. Dr Laura. Feh. The only radio and TV doctor I like, the funny and smart Dr Dean Edell (you can find him on www.healthcentral.com), at least goes by his whole name.
After Dr Phil, women (if you haven't guessed, we're talking about American women here) go for a variety of sites focusing on cosmetics, clothes, jewellery, and gift sites.
Women in the US make up the majority of net users in the US, but their European sisters continue to lag behind them - 51 per cent v 42 per cent.
Men spend more online than women, according to Jupiter Research, but because there are more women online, they also spend more overall.
Where do women go to blow their cash? To sites that will flog them home fashions, personal care items, make-up, toys, gift certificates, jewellery, watches, and pet food and supplies, says Nielsen/Net Ratings.
The last one really threw me. After all, after dotcom disaster Pets.com folded, a favourite quip among experts on the internet economy was, "And who would ever want to buy pet food online anyway?" - always said with a knowing snigger.
Women, apparently, and in large enough numbers that their visits to pet sites registered with a global analyst of website traffic. Maybe Pet.com's famous dog sock puppet mascot was put down too soon. Certainly, US sites like www.drsfostersmith.com seem to do very well indeed.
And what about the guys? More stereotypes upheld, I'm afraid. The fellas in the US head on over to electronics sites creative.com ccbill.com, and wireless equipment site linksys.com, followed up by - yawn - financial sites.
What do men buy? Consumer electronics, sporting goods, computer gear, including hardware, software and peripherals, cars and accessories, and - but of course - video games.
The tallies also don't take into account how many guys click through those spam emails to websites selling herbal Viagra and other, uh, enlargement enhancers. I'd guess those might figure in top purchases as well, at least if you go by a recent story of the site that got hacked to reveal the credit card purchase records for thousands of men, all convinced that spammers know something that modern medical science does not.
One thing is for sure - I don't fit the female norm for internet users. The top rankers in my internet browser favourites list are several news and information sites: Ireland.com (of course), the New York Times, The Guardian Unlimited site, News.com and Wired.com for technology news plus lots of others I zigzag amongst every week.
And I zip around a long list of weblogs on all sorts of subjects - some are tech-oriented, some have commentary on local or international current events; some discuss books or pets, others are smart and snappy and funny on whatever topics happen to strike the weblog writer.
I can certainly swear that I have never, ever been to Huggies.com, and only looked at Drphil.com in the course of researching this column.
It does fascinate me, though, that women are such a large proportion of internet users globally. In the mid-90s, when the text-only internet was dominated by men and the world wide web, with its graphical interface, was just beginning to gain traction, I wondered if women would ever be online in equal numbers to the guys.
The early women's portal sites really struggled, and many are now gone and forgotten, or have consolidated with other sites. Fascinating, then, that women seem to flock to specialist sites. And that they have become big buyers on the kinds of sites (like pet supplies) that couldn't survive when the net audience was more male-dominated.
Which all goes to show that, on one hand, the internet changes everything, if you look at purchasing patterns. And then, it really changes nothing at all, if you look at gender stereotypes. At least for now.
