Royal Pingdom has taken a look at social network site use by gender, and found that social network site use is dominated by women:

Highlights of their research:

• 84% (16 out of 19) of the sites have more female than male users.
• The social news sites Digg, Reddit and Slashdot have significantly more male users than female. The standout here is Slashdot which takes male geekdom to new heights with 82% male users. 🙂
• If we hadn’t included the three social news sites, all of the sites would have had more females than males.
• Twitter and Facebook have almost the same male-female ratio; Twitter with 59% female users and Facebook with 57%.
• The most female-dominated site? Bebo (66% female users), closely followed by MySpace and Classmates.com (64%).
• The average ratio of all 19 sites was 47% male, 53% female.

All the sites are predominantly female, except for Slashdot, Reddit & Digg.

Why are these predominantly male? Is it because men find them especially appealing? Is it because women find them uninviting? Is it because the sites are dominated by technology news?

Or is social news just a “guy thing”?