GeekyMom discusses how women blog more about the personal issues than male bloggers and that their posts tend to be more random than male bloggers. Guilty.
I've also noticed that my female friends use facebook differently than my male friends. Three of my female friends had the same status last week. They all said something about "towering piles of laundry." None of my male friends on Facebook has ever written anything about laundry, towering or not. Their status updates tend to be work related, random or ironic pop culture references, or travel updates. Women also seem to be more likely to talk about food in their status lines.
Of course, these observations are limited to my small group of friends. Has anybody else noticed the gender differences on Facebook?
Apt. 11d 
I’m probably guilty as charged. But I do plan to write a blogpost about “the tragedy of the laundry room” when I get the time.
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So many of my online male friends are friends via tv fandom, which has its own kind of social dynamic, plus we’re all full of ironic pop culture references. 🙂
Hm, I just counted. Out of 88 FB friends, I have 23 male friends:
6 HS (I barely pay attention to them, to be honest)
5 college (few of these guys ever post)
3 family
6 fandom
3 former students
The main activity is among women. No offense, guys, but I just don’t find you all that interesting. 😉
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I was actually thinking about this last week… My FB friends are predominantly women, who tend to update their status far more frequently than the guys do. I *think* – but haven’t scrolled back to check – that the women also tend to ask for advice/info via status updates far more often than the guys do. For that matter, I see more advocacy among the women, too — lotsa friends making their updates about calling your senator when Ledbetter was being discussed, for instance.
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Prompted by Wendy I counted 53 female and 54 male FB friends. Many are former students, all of whom are sufficiently recent not to have children, several more are post-children; I’d guess no more than 10 in the “loads of laundry” phase. I haven’t got time to go through them, but the people I know have families in residence and who are active on FB are few, and among those the women are as likely as the men to comment on work issues. Only two, one male and the other female, do I notice writing about domestic matters, except, of course, r.e. “new arrivals” which men tend to post (obviously?).
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Is it bad form to use FB for professional self promotion? ex. my article was just publishing in XYZ, I wrote a brilliant blog post link here, my students think that I am the best, I am giving the key note speech at this important conference. I frown on that use of FB, but maybe I shouldn’t.
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“the tragedy of the laundry room”
I need a bigger house so I can complain about towering laundry. Right now, we only have a closet off the downstairs bathroom so we can’t really get into proper towers.
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I think that’s an odd use of FB, Laura (though, in my opinion, just about all uses of FB are odd!) given the diffusion of people on it (I presume that no-one outside my profession is interested in my professional life, frankly). But I don’t frown on it. I worry about using blog posts to self-promote, too — I agonised about that link to my paper with Swift on parental partiality, and only did it when 2 of my colleagues urged me to. I find it easier (emotionally) to self-promote work with a co-author, because I feel I’m doing it partly for the co-author, and fortunately my best stuff (ie the stuff actually worth promoting) is all co-authored because I have such clever co-authors.
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Don’t remind me of the laundry, argh!
I use facebook mostly to keep some distant family and old school friends linked up. I try not to use the status update for anything the least bit important or truly revealing: so it mostly becomes a venue for trivial little events or observations that didn’t go to Twitter!
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Should I stop putting my papers for that year in the Christmas letter?
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I have a few professional colleagues online, and I was psyched to learn about an online publication by one of them via Facebook. I’ve never promoted my own stuff there, though, mainly because I don’t like different sides of my life to connect.
Twitter seems more “professional” to me than Facebook. I read great stuff on Twitter from people like GeekyMom, Will Richardson, and my new online crush, John Maeda.
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Darn. I still need to finish that laundry.
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I beg to differ. My Facebook status has used the word “laundry” on several occasions over the last year; at one point it became a running (bad) joke.
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OK, Chris. I stand corrected. Of course, you might be the outlier. And Julie G., you were one of the three. It was freaky how all three of you used the same words and you don’t know each other. Maybe I just have particularly laundry-adverse friends. Laundry is Steve’s job, so maybe he’ll do a facebook status on it.
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No joke, this is an actual status update from my husband a while back:
Super G is doing an epic load of laundry.
(It was the first time he did our son’s laundry by himself along with his own. He does regularly do his own laundry, though.)
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I wonder how things would play out if the numbers were crunched. Most of the status-updaters I see on a scan of my FB (N=60, with 30 male and 30 female; people who use updates N=23, 9 male and 14 female) are female. However, the most frequent updater (using a Twitter bridge) is male; and the other male Twitterer has a tendency to talk about his cooking experiments. Lots of gnomic and relationship talk from both genders. And I (female) pretty much only status update with stuff relating to work.
But that’s unsurprising, isn’t it? A lot of variation within a gender to go along with gender segregation.
But then, most of the guys who update madly have families and I don’t, so no cute stories to tell. (And I don’t seem to have that much laundry that needs doing, hm.)
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I try to avoid status updates, but I enjoy seeing other people’s updates.
Mine tend to be stuff about the kids or a book that I have read. Maybe I should do more status updates with “11B has an excellent post!”
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