Pew Internet and American Life Project

Posted on | December 30, 2005 | No Comments

From the full report accompanying the SMH story:

In emailers’ working life, women are more likely than men to value the positive effects of email for improving relationships, from expanding their circle of colleagues to encouraging teamwork. Women also value email for a kind of positive, water-cooler effect, which lightens the atmosphere of office life.
[...]
Women find emailing at work more effective and valuable than men do. In May 2002, we asked users a battery of questions to compare email with phone or face-to-face contact for handling various tasks at work. More women than men named email as the most effective way to handle every work situation we queried: to make appointments; to edit or review documents; to ask questions about work issues; and to deal with problems with supervisors. Women were also consistently more likely than men to see email as a positive force in the workplace. More women than men said email improves teamwork in the workplace; expands their circle of colleagues at work; makes them more available to co-workers; helps them stay current with events at work; provides moments of relief from work; saves them time; and liberates them from being tied to the office. Women were less likely than men to cite email’s negative effects. Women were less likely to say email makes it too easy for outsiders to reach them and makes them too accessible to others inside the company. Men and women were equally likely to consider email at work to be a source of stress, gossip, misunderstanding, and to say they can’t get away from it. Overall, more women, 20%, than men, 15%, give email in the workplace the highest praise, saying they “can’t live without it.”

The statistics of web use by education level and income are staggering, if unsurprising.

Category: Research

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