Pinterest: more popular with “women” than normal people

Ask me if I’d like to give my opinion for something and I will free-associate on that theme for the entire afternoon.

So, it’s perhaps lucky that I didn’t get my thoughts over to Hannah in time to get featured in her piece about the popularity of Pinterest for the Guardian. She kindly created an extended cut for her blog, however, adding in some of the other stragglers.

Hannah asked me why I thought Pinterest appealed so much to women. As we all know, I am always more than happy to speak on behalf of my entire sex despite the fact that I am a massive geek who thinks films with swords in are cool.

Here’s what I said:

I think this gender thing is a little bit disingenuous. There would be NO articles about why a social bookmarking site was mainly populated by males…

However, there’s no doubt that the design of the site is geared to be female-friendly, unlike more masculine-looking social curation sites like Digg or Metafilter. The “about” page is also very female-focused (although I’m sure there are plenty of men who quite fancy sharing all the “beautiful things” they find on the web while they “plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes”).

But I would argue that most of the social curation and social bookmarking sites started out as sites created by men for men. I doubt it was a conscious decision for many, of course. But, since so many of them were created to serve particular communities, it often worked out that way.

If the population really is more female than male, it is because Pinterest has been picked up by the craft, design and cookery communities online and because it was in closed Beta for long enough to get a very focused set of communities.

But it won’t be long before there are just as many virtual pinboards filled with cars, technology and whatever other stereotypical things men are supposed to be interested in.

And if that doesn’t happen, so what? It doesn’t make Pinterest freakish if it attracts the other 50%.

Pinterest – why the new social network is gaining so much interest. (Hannah Waldram’s blog)

Pinterest piqued in UK for ‘creative, pretty and completist’ social network (Hannah’s article on the Guardian website)

And here’s my cue to give you a link to my Pinterest boards, which look fairly moth-eaten and aren’t anything like as excellent as my Wists account. Why couldn’t Wists have been Pinterest? That would have saved me a whole heap of effort.

Also: Dork Adore’s Pinterest

Image: JM2C