Key Highlights:

* Facebook reporting nearly 45.3 million active US users in the last 30 days
* Facebook growing in every age/gender demographic. Fastest growing segment: Women over 55, up 175.3% in the last 120 days.
* Facebook growing faster with women than men in almost every age group. Women comprise 56.2% of Facebook’s audience, up from 54.3% late last year.
* 45% of Facebook’s US audience is now 26 years old or older.

More:

Overall, women now outnumber men in every age group on Facebook. In total, women now make up about 56.2% of Facebook’s US audience, up from 54.3% late last year. Women most outnumber men in the 18-25 and 26-34 age groups, where there are 1.4 females for every 1 male on Facebook.

The obvious question is, why? More from InsideFacebook.com

Via ABC News:
Bra Color Status on Facebook Goes Viral
Women Post Bra Colors, Sizes and Saucy Comments to Raise Awareness for Breast Cancer

The trend seemed to have started with a chain e-mail that asked women to forward it to all the female friends in their address book.

“Some fun is going on….just write the colour of your bra in your status..just the colour, nothing else, and send this on to ONLY girls no men… it will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status…thanks ladies!”  Read the entire article.

Investigating issues of territorialization, gender identity and social class at the intersection of culture, art and technology, “Status of Women” presents profiles of ten diverse women artists living in Los Angeles gleaned from the artist’s Facebook network. The title is a play on ideas, exploring how far women have come at this point in the 21st century—examining the actual condition of women in contemporary society—in relation to what women literally post on their Facebook “walls” as status messages.

Although social networking via the internet purports to be open and democratic, it also entails inherent constraints. In effect, with responses limited to a specific number of typed characters, one is enjoined to share one’s thoughts and feelings in language wherein expressive restrictions apply, by virtue of having to utilize only a certain number of words often addressed to a selective number of interlocutors. And this begs further reflections:

How does the content that women choose to post on Facebook index the current condition of women in contemporary society? With the Facebook page serving as a virtual “room of one’s own” for many women, is their engagement in social networking predicated on the sense (or semblance) of empowerment that it may afford, beyond the expectations of one’s social role? Such questions, as well as considerations of the differential levels of participation, types of interactions, communities, collaborations, and self-construction that women engage in via Facebook, remain intriguing concerns and are deserving of serious exploration.

Featured artists are: Amitis Motevalli, Erika E. Reynoso, Flora Kao, Linda Kunik, Marjan Vayghan, Marissa Mercardo, Michiko Yao, Raksha Parekh, Yong Soon Min and Zeal Harris.
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Status of Women Gallery