There’s been much discussion lately about which presidential candidate is better for women, favored by women, and likely to win the women’s vote.  And while Twitter is a very unscientific way of estimating that, it is interesting to look at who’s actively supporting the candidates on Twitter.

One easy way to identify supporters is to look at people who retweet the candidate’s message — there’s no purer form of support on Twitter than that.  And when we look at who is retweeting each of the candidates, an interesting statistic emerges:

Barack Obama’s retweeters are evenly split between men and women, while Mitt Romney’s retweeters are 70% male and 30% female.

These numbers are even worse than the look, if this assessment of the overall Twitter community is correct: it says overall population of Twitter is 55% female, which means women are over-represented.  If we compensate for this so that gender mix on Twitter  matches that of the USA,  Romney drops to only getting about 26% of his retweets from women.

It is clear that, when it comes to Twitter, there’s a gender gap for Romney.  It will be interesting to see how this progresses through the campaign season.

Methodology:

I looked at all retweets for each candidate for the period 5/14 through 5/20, and estimated the breakdown of the retweet population by a statistically valid sampling.

There are two factors which come into play in this kind of analysis.  First is the sample size.  I looked at a large enough random sampling of retweets to make an observation with +/- 5% accuracy at a 95% confidence interval.  Second is determination on gender — for a discussion on that topic, see this page.