May I put LinkedIn in its place, please?

Huh.

Who knew that in the competitive social media landscape, LinkedIn was the equivalent of the aloof cheerleader in high school who claimed that people who didn't like her were "just jealous."

At least that's how it appears when The Atlantic Wire releases an article claiming that women just don't "get" LinkedIn. They go one further and purport that we're less "savvy" at social networking than men.

Full disclosure: The professional networking site itself defines "savvy" in a rather unusual way -- "a ratio of two things: 1) the ratio of one-way connections that men have to connections that women have, and 2) the ratio of male members on LinkedIn to female members. We label an industry as “female savvy” when, for example, 45% of the industry is female and where women have 70% of the connections. A perfectly neutral industry is one in which the % of females in the industry is equal to the % of connections that women have in the industry."

Okaaaaay.

Now, I'd be taking this declaration more seriously if the Pew Research Center had themselves deemed women less fluent in corporate social-professional networking, but this is the scorned company itself declaring that because fewer women USE the site, it must naturally follow that they don't UNDERSTAND the site.

Bit of a jump from Observation A to Insult B, I'd say, particularly given that the same study indicates that "As with the use of most social media, SNS users are disproportionately female (56%). Women also comprise the majority of email users (52% women), users of instant message (55%), bloggers (54%), and those who use a photo sharing service (58%)." Soooo, we use electronic forms of communication in greater proportion than men, but when it comes to THIS PARTICULAR SITE, we're just dumbfounded as to how to make it work for us. Couldn't possibly be that we don't like the product.

Actually, the study itself, "Social networking sites and our lives: how people's trust, personal relationships, and civic and political involvement are connected to their use of social networking sites and other technologies" is a fascinating read. The Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project took a look at our use of social networking sites to investigate how our participation relates to our "varying social behaviors and attitudes." The study actually pointed toward an interesting discovery: that we're MORE intimately connected with one another now that we're all up in each other's business on the webernets.

Here's my perspective on the LinkedIn disparity -- it's very similar to the Wikipedia gender disparity (that is, the fact that most creators of Wikipedia content are male) which was explained very well by Kevin Drum of Mother Jones:

"The gender disparity is real. But I suspect the reason has less to do with women having trouble asserting their opinions and more to do with the prevalence of obsessive, Aspergers-ish behavior among men. After all, why would anyone spend endless hours researching, writing and editing a Wikipedia post for free about either The Simpsons or Mexican feminist writers? I think that "having an opinion on the subject" is far too pale a description of why people do or don't do this. You need to be obsessed. You need to really care about the minutia of the subject and whether it's presented in exactly the right way. And you need to care about this in a forum with no professional prestige. You're really, truly doing it just for the sake of the thing itself. I've long been convinced that this tendency toward obsession is one of the key differences between men and women. I don't know what causes it. I don't know if it helped primitive men kill more mastodons during the late Pleistocene."

Aha. In that case, it would make this observation within another Atlantic Wire article that much more accurate. "Given that LinkedIn is the only specifically business- and career-oriented site on the list, are these numbers a reflection of the real world's male-dominanted hierarchies, slipping in to pixelated form? Or is it just that men are more into uploading resumes and feeling important on the Internet? We're kind of leaning to the latter..."

Aha. And there it is: professional accomplishment versus relationship-building, one of those age-old, hallmark gender differences.

I'll be frank - I log into LinkedIn only occasionally; typically after a rough week at work when I want to touch up my resume and dip my toe into the job prospecting pool. Immediately following that, I'll head over to Facebook to cruise through pictures of So-and-so's anniversary weekend or engagement photos or baby pictures or whatever - because it takes my mind OFF of the work situation and places it back in more comfortable, people-oriented territory.

LinkedIn tends to reduce its users to a series of positions they've held, to a series of colleagues who's work they recommend, to organizations who's board they chair. Reduces them to their resumes. And perhaps, for men who (to generalize) tend to extract a greater sense of worth from accomplishment than from relationship, the cooler, hands-off nature that comparing resume size on LinkedIn provides is, inherently, more attractive to men.

And it's not that we don't "get it."

It's that we don't like it.

At least not in our spare time. Not for fun.