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 Arab Women Show Digital Prowess |
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By THE MEDIA LINE
Study finds Arab women online to have highly active social lives on the Internet.
Contrary to the belief that Arab women throughout the Middle East do not have access to or interest in the Internet outside of work, the vast majority of Arab women access the web from home, belong to a social networking site and use the Internet to connect with friends, a regional survey by the Gulf-based research group YouGovSiraj has found.
The study into evolving online attitudes and behaviors of Arab women across the Middle East found that 85 percent of Arab women using the Internet access it from home, 71% belong to a social network and 66% connect with friends online on a daily basis. The survey also found 45% of Arab women online were reading articles and magazines, and 34% of them were spending at least 10 hours a week browsing the Internet outside of work.
The study conducted in April and released on Sunday, surveyed over 1,250 women from Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
Lebanon held the highest online usage for women with 68% of those surveyed spending more than seven hours a week online outside of work, followed by the UAE at 55%, Kuwait 53%, Egypt 50%, Qatar 47%, Saudi Arabia and Jordan 44%, Bahrain 42%, Syria 34% and Oman 30%.
The study found Facebook to be the leading social networking platform among Arab women, with an estimated 91% of online Lebanese women having a Facebook account, followed by 80% of online women in Egypt, 78% in the UAE, 70% in Jordan, 68% in Kuwait and Qatar, 66% in Bahrain, 64% in Saudi Arabia, 55% in Oman and 45% in Syria.
“This was a huge study,” Lara Al Barazi, Research Manager at YouGovSiraj told The Media Line. “We combined quantitative and qualitative approaches to better understand Arab women’s lives online: how they access the Internet, what kind of websites and information they look at, what role it plays in their lives, and what they do when they are done.”
“You have to remember that these people are already connected,” she said. “So this was not a study into how many Arab women connect to the Internet, it was a study into what Arab women who are already connected are doing online.”
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