Why Men Don't Iron is a recent TV series which showed that men cannot find things as easily as women, or do more than one thing at a time as efficiently as women or take care of children as well as women. But it's ok chaps, concluded the programme makers, it's not your fault. It's the way you are born - something to do with your chromosomes affecting your brain.
If the Men Don't Iron people had looked at the way women and men use the Internet, they would have found a gender difference there too - although whether it is because of a man's brain is not so clear.
The Internet used to be dominated by men, with its main users working in academia or the computer industry. However, the gap is narrowing; women worldwide are taking to the Net in their droves - and Irish women have overtaken their European counterparts. According to a survey by the Irish Internet Association (Feb '98), 31 per cent of Irish Web surfers are female, compared with the European average of 28 per cent and the US average of 38 per cent. But it appears women do not access the Internet in the same way as men.
A commissioner on the Government's Information Society Commission, Selina Bonnie, has come across one fundamental gender difference: "Men spend more time online than women. I know men who spend hours at a time surfing, while I've spent six hours surfing in the last year." She attributes this to lack of time, because most women are homemakers and "it's not practical very often".
While men spend hours happily clicking their way through cyberspace, pausing occasionally to play an interactive game or to wait for a graphic to load, research shows that women are less likely to surf and tend to go online with a specific purpose in mind.
Women see the Internet as a tool to look for information or to send and receive email. Nua Internet Surveys list a report by Internet Profiles Corp and Media Metrix which found "males access more pages than women (perhaps an indication of a shorter attention span)".
According to the vice-president of Jupiter Communications, Yvette DeBow: "Women have less disposable time on their hands. What women are attracted to is resources that save them time, save them money and provide them with a little breathing space."
Relationships are the key to women's Internet usage. For women with access, says Bonnie, email has replaced letter-writing as a more efficient way of keeping in touch with friends, family and colleagues. "While men send emails too, they tend to be more business-like and functional - often work-related," she says. And when their emails are not work-related, anecdotal evidence suggests men often use emails as toys or entertainment and send lists of jokes, or files of graphics, video or sound.
Among women and men who pay around £4.50 an hour to go online in Dublin's Laser and Cyberia Internet cafes, the numbers checking their email are almost equal - with around 45 per cent women and 55 per cent men - though it is only men who play the games (which have names such as Red Alert, and Command and Conquer).
If you want to surf the Internet at home, it often means cutting yourself off from the rest of the household and going into a spare room, study or bedroom. This could be one reason women spend less time online, according to UK academics Eileen Green and Alison Adam in Online Leisure: Gender and ICTs (Information and Communications Technology) in the Home. Women, particularly those with children, are less likely than men to leave the centre of family activity, usually the living room, to spend time alone surfing the Internet.
Studies of women's leisure show that they rarely ever do one thing at a time. When watching TV for instance, women often knit, sew or iron - whilst also taking care of children. Computers, however, need more attention than a TV: "As hands as well as eyes are engaged in using a PC, it is hard to imagine knitting and surfing the Net at the same time," comment Green and Adam.
One use of the Internet which is growing fast is online shopping. Although in real life, women do most of a family's shopping, it appears that in cyberspace, men spend twice the amount women do, and one survey found that only 1 per cent of women go online to shop. "This could be because fewer women have credit cards," suggests Bonnie.
Content is a major issue - why would women want to spend time surfing the Web when so many of the sites are boring, self-indulgent or pornographic? This, however, is beginning to change and over the last few years women have started to make their presence felt on the Net. If you put in a search for women's Internet sites, you will find thousands - ranging from Heartless Bitches (www.heartless-bitches.com) and Cybergrrl (www.cybergrrl.com) to Moms Online (www.momsonline.com) and Cyber Mom (www.thecybermom.com) - and discussion lists ranging from Cyber-sisters for female artists, Sister-L for issues relating to nuns and Beijing95-L on the UN Conference on Women. (See Monitor for how to subscribe to these lists.)
In her comprehensive guide, WOW - Women on the Web (available only from WERRC (Women's Education Research and Resource Centre) at UCD), Helen Fallon comments: "Women are increasingly laying claim to space within this new medium. Re-defining the World Wide Web as a place of gender equity . . . involves the creative act of re-imagining its potential use." WOW is at www.dcu.ie/staff/hfallon/thesis.htm
Sarah Marriott is at sarah marriott@hotmail.com