This helped identify clear gender differences. It was seen that
The study evaluated mobile phone data from 15% of the population – 1.2 million Austrians between February and June 2020 via access to anonymized telecommunication data from a major Austrian internet service provider.
Behavioral Differences
“The total shutdown of public life was like a population-wide live experiment. We were interested in the extent to which people supported the anti-Corona measures imposed by the government. When we analyzed the data by gender, we found surprisingly strong behavioral differences between men and women,” says CSH researcher Tobias Reisch.
These gender categories were self-reported and were limited to females and males for technical reasons. Although people made much longer phone calls, they spoke to fewer people than usual.
Data revealed that women to women calls went up to 1,5 times longer than before the crisis (+140%), calls from men to women lasted nearly twice as long after the first lockdown (March 16) in Austria.
On the contrary, when women called men, the duration went up to 80% longer, while that between men went up to only 66%.
“Of course, we don’t know the content or purpose of these calls. Yet, literature from the social sciences provides evidencemostly from small surveys, polls, or interviewsthat women tend to choose more active strategies to cope with stress, such as talking with others. Our study would confirm that,” says Georg Heiler, a researcher at CSH and TU Wien, who was responsible for data processing.
In addition, women were also found to have more significantly limited mobility than men did. And as soon as the measures were lifted, men returned more quickly to their pre-pandemic mobility patterns.
The study provides quick social insights telecommunication data without violating the anonymity of individuals at low costs, thereby offering a quantitative support for research questions in psychology and the social sciences.
Source: Medindia
