The internet is becoming increasingly indispensable for women, with over two thirds (66.1 percent) saying their lives would be disrupted if they had to go without the web for a week.
Burst Media’s study of 1,800 women aged 25 and over found four out of five females go online between 7am and midnight.
A majority of those aged over 65 go online before 7am. A third of women say they use the net during normal hours for primarily personal use, but that climbs to 52 percent between 4pm and 7pm, when one in 10 women go online for family-related content, and to 70.8 percent between 7pm and midnight.
In a finding that will pique the interests of marketers who have long targeted the spending power of women, who are seen as controlling the purse strings in many family homes, 54.5 percent of females said the internet is their primary resources on products they are considering purchasing, beating family and friends (10.9 percent), newspapers and magazines (9.9 percent), TV (5.8 percent), brochures (5.1 percent) and radio (1.3 percent).
And some 51.4 percent of women of all age groups used the web to do shopping in the last year, mostly for travel (37.5 percent), adult clothing (32.4 percent), health and beauty products (27 percent), children’s clothing (18.8 percent), financial products (15 percent) and groceries (14.9 percent).
Some 43.6 percent of women said their daily routine would be “significantly” impacted upon if the internet were removed from their lives.