Who creates content online and who just consumes it

The internet gap: high consumption and few creative spaces

Women are the majority on social media and barely appear in technical discussion spaces. The paradox, verifiable by opening any browser, supports an analysis of how the internet is divided by sens: there are platforms that concentrate attention and purchases, and others that remain almost exclusively male territory. Whoever raises the issue doesn't mince words and claims that in photography, programming, computing or history there is "not a single trace" of women, except on Instagram, TikTok and the occasional shopping review.

As blunt as it is difficult to measure, the starting point leaves a reasonable question for the digital economy: if half the population doesn't occupy those spaces, who sustains them and what does that say about the value given to free time?

What the gender gap in internet use reveals

The dominant thesis is that the internet is divided by sens with hardly any mixing. It is noted that women concentrate on Instagram, Amazon, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and WhatsApp, and outside of that, with few exceptions, they don't venture. In contrast, another reading adds the nuance of anonymity: social media would be full of female profiles without a name to identify them, so a rough count always underestimates their real presence.

The other extreme is illustrated by shopping. Several interventions coincide on a domestic symptom: the package that arrives every day, the fever for fast-fashion platforms and the office conversation that revolves around them. The general impression is that online commerce has replaced any other hobby in much of women's free time.

Shopping, attention and the economic logic of platforms

Here the diagnosis becomes economic. Consumption is not an anomaly, it is the engine that sustains much of the digital business: attention turned into a shop window and shop window turned into a shopping cart. The uncomfortable question is raised by one intervention: what would happen if someone lived with unlimited attention, without needing to conquer it. The implied answer is fewer hobbies and more phone.

It is not a minor argument. The attention economy rewards those who capture it, not those who produce it with effort; and in that logic, creation—technical spaces, blogs, collective memory—loses out to the shop window. It is the flip side of a system that measures the value of a screen by what it sells, not by what it teaches. On who wins with that distribution, there is broad agreement: the platform.

Women also create, albeit in other niches

The strongest counterargument points out that the diagnosis is made from a single corner of the internet. There are millions of women trinc and producing content about home, decoration, crafts, parenting, beauty and health, with entire communities created by and for them. They channel trinc and make millionaires of those who sustain them. The objection is completed: much of that content is for consumption, not discussion, and in gossip niches the dynamics become something else. Is it an absence or a different geography? The full list of habits that each side attributes to the opposite sens, with its long dozen points, deserves a full read to gauge how much is observation and how much is caricature.

From the present to the Paleolithic: the drift of roles

The conversation didn't stay on the phone. Part of it went to the Paleolithic, with two conflicting analyses. One defends a classic division: men hunted, women fished, checked traps, tanned hides, dried food and tended the fire and children, equally hard work. The other responds that recent research dismantles that simplistic scheme: there are tombs with men and women buried alongside their weapons, and the daily life of ancestral peoples points to a more porous division. In between, a third, more prosaic diagnosis: whatever the role, it was a pavor of the era.

Another batch drifted toward couples. Recipes appeared on how to choose, surrender and please, with a catalog of condemnations of desire and comparison. The conversation tensed, insults and weariness entered; some interventions highlighted just the opposite: that a woman who knows how to do things and has her own hobbies is highly valued.

Is free time a matter of priorities?

The coldest explanation came from dating apps. If someone had their inbox full of private messages, it is said, they wouldn't read the news either: life is a matter of priorities. From that perspective, time is not distributed by ability, but by where available attention yields the most. Another closure of the same circle: time without effort barely leaves a trace, and perhaps the problem is not who looks at the screen, but for what purpose.

With the map in front of us, the imbalance is hard to deny and easy to misinterpret. Does it measure different interests, different opportunities, or simply the bias of those observing from a single corner of the internet?