Are women really more internet savvy than men?

The amount of time we spend on the internet can easily be attributed to the fact that we live in a time where everyone literally always has their phone on them or at least leaves it within reach when they're not using it.

If it's not a phone in your hand, it's a PC in your face or a tablet in your handbag. Essentially, we never disconnect. 

And while women in South Africa are definitely engaging on social media more and shopping online more than the gents (see below), these two online activities are actually not the main internet attractions for African women.

Supplied

We're more multifaceted than that.

1500 women and men aged 14 to 44 in Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa were surveyed by the well-known global software company, Opera as well as Worldreader, and the results pretty much confirmed the fact that we seldom disconnect by revealing that women in Africa are accessing their browsers more than eight times a day. 

This is not a shocking revelation, considering the amount of time we spend on social media and the fact that as a student, you can't complete any task without access to the internet.

Furthermore, the digital age means that a lot of careers are built exclusively online and continue to thrive within the web space.

Read more: Can you build a lasting, lucrative career from social media?

The Opera study further showed South African women are spending more on data than their male counterparts per month even in the midst of South Africa's #DataMustFall campaign (which isn't doing as well as it should by the way).

The high data expenditure by women is most likely due to the fact that the internet has become a space which offers women so much more than it used to about 10 years ago. In 2005 the Pew Research Center observed that women's online activities started catching up to that of men and black women also started showing a surge in online activity over three years.

This was based on an American study, but when you bring it back home to Africa you see that the reasons women are spending more time on the internet are not that different from each other given that the internet is a global sphere anyway.

The 2005 survey indicated that women were using the internet as an effective means of communication and the same seems to hold true for African women too.

However, according the Opera study, there's more to online activity than just communication - African women are using their data on entertainment and self-empowerment too by accessing lifestyle, entertainment, education, music, economic and health content sites.

Again this is no surprise - think how quickly you reach out to your phone to google symptoms whenever you feel a little unwell, or how fast you download that song you just Shazamed and not forgetting how much we like to click on every other link we come across on Twitter or Facebook.

This is also a time where we are creating our own digital content too on an almost daily basis, so it has become necessary to stay logged on for longer periods of time and more frequently.

Also, given the fact that the digital age means we are more environmentally aware than ever before, it makes sense that fiction e-books are flying off the online shelves of organisations such as Worldreader. 

Do you think you spend too much time on the internet? And what do you mostly do while online? Tell us on Twitter or on our Facebook page.