Over the past two years its become an accepted truth that by and large women are more active in social media than men. There was the 2009 Rapleaf study showing that women have more social media friends. And Royal Pingdom found that the majority of social networks had more female than male users (with some exceptions such as Reddit and Digg).
Both those reports were US focused. Now comes confirmation from Comscore that the same holds true in the major European countries (the EU5 - UK, France, Germany, Spain and Italy).
Across all age groups, European women spend more time on social networking sites than men. Not surprisingly, young women aged 15-24 spend the most time on social media at 8.4 hours a month. What is a surprise, is that among women it isn't 25-34 year olds that come next, but 45-54 year olds.
In fact, women aged 45-54 spend more than twice as much time on social networks as their male counterparts (5.5 vs 2.7 hours a month), pointing to a digital divide opening up - not between the young and old in general, but with men aged 45+ increasingly being left behind.