Mobile phone gender roles

Nielsen reported in their last issue of Wire, that people around the world love their mobile phones, but they use them in vastly different ways.

In China, the mobile internet is very popular. 73 percent of Chinese mobile youth ages 15-24 reported using the mobile internet in the previous 30 days compared to 48 percent of U.S. mobile youth and 46 percent of U.K. youth, reports Nielsen.

The graph to the left shows how men and women around the world uses sms and mms. As you can see females are most keen on using these functions in countries like Us and Uk, while this is a male activity in countries like China, India and Saudi Arabia. This is of course a result of gender roles.

Life will for sure be different for a woman, depending on where she is born... For example, 49 % of indian young men who claim to have slept with a prostitute. 63 % hoped that their bride would be a virgin on their wedding night (Time magazine 2006). In Iran a rape has to be witnessed by four men to be illegal (Newsweek 2006).  In Australia sons are five times more likely than daughters to succeed their fathers in family businesses (BRW 2010).