For working women, juggling work and family life has always been a task of Herculean proportions.
    Could the internet be the solution women have been seeking all these years?
    Very much so, suggests a recent study conducted by Cyber Dialogue for the Walt Disney Internet Group.
    Researchers report that fully 86 percent of web-using women credit the internet with simplifying their lives, particularly when it comes to balancing work and family.
    Convenient shopping, bundled information and useful communication tools are among the main things women find online that help them simplify their lives.
    The study says that 84 percent of online women report that the web is now their preferred information source for topics such as weather, news and health.
    Sixty-nine percent of wired women seek information for helping with their families on a daily basis. Half of women say that the web has brought them closer to their families, which can mean anything from sitting down at the computer to play a game with their kindergartener to instant messaging with their college students.
   Ninety-two percent of wired women also report that the web is a prime source of entertainment. Within the past six months, 82 percent have looked up entertainment content; 66 percent have gone to hobby sites, and 59 percent have visited travel sites.
    Sixty percent of wired women have purchased goods online. Fifty-three percent are influenced in their purchasing decisions by their children, and 40 percent say that online ads affect their spending choices. Sixty-five percent report that they would rather shop online than in a store.
    The web is becoming central to women’s lives in a way that should make media planners sit up and take notice.
    According to the survey, web surfing and email use together now account for 47 percent of women’s media consumption. By contrast, 31 percent of women’s media consumption involves viewing network and cable TV, according to the survey.
    This particular finding, while striking, may not be strictly accurate, reports Cyber Dialogue researcher Melissa Grimes.
   "Sometimes people actually over-report the amount of time they spend online," she says.
    Even so, the fact that women perceive that they are spending the same amount of time online as watching TV is itself important for media planners to be aware of, she says.
    "TV’s not going to go away," Grimes says. But she believes the message hiding in this survey is that the web has got to be more fully integrated in media plans, at least if the goal is reaching women.
    "Media planning and new media planning should not be two separate things. They need to come together. Media planners need to integrate the internet into their media planning goals."
     Disney and Cyber Dialogue divided women internet users into four categories: "web-wise moms," "carefree web women," "stressed web moms," and "web-wary women."
    The study recognizes that not all women web users are at home in the medium – hence the "web-wary women" category. They earn slightly more than "stressed web moms" and are essentially internet newbies. They’re unlikely to partake in e-commerce, mainly because they’re uneasy about sharing their credit card numbers online.
    "We also call them the ‘Amazon.com crowd,’ because while they’re using the internet – and they are using the internet to shop a little – they’re more comfortable buying items like books and music, items that they actually know what they are before they buy," Grimes says.
    Traditionally people haven’t had strong faith in all internet content. But the study’s numbers indicate that most women trust the information they find online. Grimes notes that web-wary women are the only group of wired women who don’t trust online content and shopping.
    Web-wary women, Grimes says, are the most transient grouping.
    "Ultimately, these web-wary women, after making a few transactions, are realizing that it’s safe to put their credit cards over the internet and may become web-wise moms or stressed web moms," she says. "These segments will change over time."
   Cyber Dialogue administered online polls to 2,010 men and women from Dec. 8 to Dec. 13, 2000. Respondents were selected from Cyber Dialogue’s 100,000-person panel of net users. They were weighted to represent the online population.

-Marty Beard is a staff writer for Media Life.

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