There’s been some interesting research about the differences in the way that men and women present their own creative work online. At first the results look slightly odd. Men do more creative work than women? Really?

Men are overrepresented online when it comes to sharing creative work, according to a new report from Northwestern University.

What’s he reason for this? Is it men showing off more? Using shown creativity to get the babes, as the usual status display activities of males are about? Well, no.

Researchers Eszter Hargittai and Gina Walejko found that men were much more likely to post their writings, photos, videos, and other creations on the Internet than women, despite the fact that they were equally likely to participate in such activities.

Or, in fact, maybe. If the two sexes participate equally in creative endeavours then perhaps he men do display it online as a method of showing off?

Umm, well, again, no, as the researcher’s own blog post points out.

The post reports on a study in which we found that male college students are more likely than their female counterparts to share creative content online even though both men and women in the sample are equally likely to create such content. However, when controlling for online skill, the gender differences in posting go away.

And again, controlling for skill is the important point:

Curious to see what explains these differences in sharing, we looked at whether various measures of Internet experience account for the divergences. We controlled for years of Internet use, frequency of Internet use, number of Internet access locations, and online skill. Of these four, skill was a significant predictor of sharing activity. In fact, once skill is in the model, gender is no longer a significant predictor of posting one’s material.

So the study actually found, in the end, that, assuming a similar familiarity with the internet, that there’s no difference in the propensity to either make creative works or to show them off on the net between the sexes.

But we do have this imbalance in what does in fact get shown: which leads us back to another rather interesting question. The difference in what is shown, men showing more than women, comes from the fact that the men seem to have greater familiarity with and skill in using the net itself.

So, where does that come from? Is it simply another manifestation of the male brain, as described in our EQSQ personality tests? That geeks are more likely to be male?