Here at Fenton we’ve had the honor of working with New York Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn (they’ve previous won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on Tiananmen Square) on the movement they’ve sparked around the release of their latest book Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity World Wide.

They’ve been covered by Oprah, NBC, the New York Times Magazine dedicated and entire issue to what they called “Women: The Issue of Our Time”. We’ve worked together to created #halfthesky on Twitter and recently launched @halfskytues (we’re dedicating Tuesdays to all things half the sky and working with more than 30 women’s non-profits to flood Twitter with stories of hope, outstanding organizations, ideas on how to get involved, profiles of courage, etc.)

Most recently the campaign launched a button campaign that encourages all those that support the Half the Sky movement…

read more »

A new study out by SheConnected, “The Power of Social Networking For Women Research Study” shows how women use social networking sites. It’s important to note that these women were recruited from social networking sites so the numbers are skewed but still informative.

Some highlights include:
- 59% are are visiting sites multiple times per day.
- Facebook was the most popular social network among these users, with 83% belonging to the site.
- 55% were on Twitter.
- 93% said that control over their own privacy settings were very important.
- 71% said using social networks to network professional was very important and 62% said to stay up-to-date with friends.

More women use social networking than men and if your organization doesn’t understand the trends and strategies on how to maximize them you’re missing out on a key audience.

read more »

A new study released in Harvard Business publishing examines gender trends in Twitter.

Highlights include:

• Females hold a slight majority on Twitter:  men comprise 45% of Twitter users, while women represent 55%.
• Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. Men also have more reciprocated relationships, in which two users follow each other. This “follower split” suggests that women are driven less by followers than men, or havemore stringent thresholds for reciprocating relationships.
• An average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman.
• An average woman is 25% more likely to follow a man than a woman.
• An average man is 40% more likely to be followed by another man than by a woman. These results cannot be explained by different tweeting activity – both men and women tweet at the same

…

read more »