Gender Patterns in a Large Online Social Network

Gender differences in human social and communication behavior have long been observed in various contexts. This study investigates such differences in the case of online social networking. We find a general tendency towards gender homophily, more marked for women, however users having a large circle of friends tend to have more connections with users of the opposite gender. We also inspect the temporal sequences of adding new friends and find that females are much more likely to connect with other females as their initial friends. Through studying triangle motifs broken down by gender we detect a marked tendency of users to gender segregation, i.e. to form single gender groups; this phenomenon is more accentuated for male users.