Women and Tech

International Women’s Day is Wednesday, March 8th, so in this edition of Pornhub Insights we’re once again taking a look at how women consume porn differently than their male counterparts. In the past we’ve studied Women’s Favorite Searches, their love for lesbian (nsfw) and gay porn in our Women Searching for Women and Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys posts, and even how women differ in certain countries like Ireland and Colombia.

As we discovered in our recent Year in Review, women account for around 26% of visitors to Pornhub. That level of traffic was enough to cause a massive drop in Pornhub visits during the Women’s March in January 2017. Because some would argue that the medium is as important as the message, in this edition of Insights we will be taking a look at the various technologies that women use to watch porn, and how that compares to men.

Over the last several years, the use of mobile devices to browse Pornhub has grown exponentially. Currently, about 72% of worldwide traffic to Pornhub comes from smartphones and tablets. But mobile use is actually much higher with women than men. As of February 2017, nearly 80% of female traffic comes from mobile, compared to about 69% for men. As the following chart illustrates, mobile growth has been similar for both genders, but women have remained around 10% higher than men since 2014. At the end of this post we’ve also broken down women’s mobile use by countries and U.S. states.

71% of female traffic to Pornhub comes from smartphones, 8% from tablets and 21% desktop. Proportionately, women are -34% less likely to use desktop computers to than men, but 16% more likely to use phones and +10% more for tablets.

When broken down by female age groups, we can see the largest proportion of smartphone use (78%) comes from millennials aged 18-34. Visits from desktop computers and tablets both increase by age, with less than 50% of women using smartphones over the age of 55. Device usage is similar with men, with smartphones being consistently more popular with younger visitors.

We can still see however, that regardless of the age group, women are always proportionately more likely to be using mobile devices. The mobile tech gap increases by age, where women over 55 are nearly +40% more likely to be using smartphones than their male counterparts, and +66% more likely over the age of 65.

The majority of desktop traffic comes from Windows computers. Although women use Windows 84% of the time, that’s proportionately -4% less than men. Apple’s MacOS accounts for 12% of female traffic, which is proportionately +8% more popular than men. And although they account for a very small percentage of traffic, women are far more likely to use alternate operating systems like Linux (+14%) and Chrome OS (+33%).

When it comes to mobile operating systems, 53% of women are using Android and 45% Apple iOS. Once again, women prefer Apple based tech with a +5% increase in iOS popularity, and a -3% decrease in Android compared to men.

53% of women use Chrome as their web browser, a 3% increase in popularity over men. 15% use Firefox, 12% Internet Explorer and 9% Edge, although each of those are less popular when compared to men. Once again, the biggest increase in popularity comes thanks to Apple tech, with women being 13% more likely to use Safari as their web browser.

On mobile devices, Chrome is again more popular with 54% of female traffic, and 34% going to Apple’s Safari. Proportionately, women are -3% less likely to use Chrome but +9% more likely to be using Safari compared to men. On Android based devices, women are +6% more likely to be using the default Android browser than men.

On average, an incredible 89% of women in the United States are using mobile devices (including phones and tablets) to visit Pornhub. But some states have even more women on the go, especially in the D.C. where 94% of female traffic comes from mobile! That’s followed closely by Texas at 93%, and Georgia and Michigan at 92%. States where women are less likely to use mobile include Vermont at only 78%, and New Hampshire and Main at 81%.

Women visiting Pornhub from South Africa are the most likely to be using mobile devices at 91%. The United States takes second spot at 89% followed by 86% mobile use in the United Kingdom, Pakistan and India. In some countries the popularity of mobile is much greater when compared to men. For example, in Thailand women are 38% more likely to be using mobile than men, 32% more likely in Taiwan and 42% more in Hong Kong.

We hope you enjoyed this edition of Pornhub Insights. As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.