Changing demographics are often fodder for news, but a new Internet survey puts the Internet on the front page. The topic? Women. For the first time, women have pulled ahead of men in Internet usage.

About 50.4 percent of Web users are women, says Media Metrix, but is the feminization of the Web here to stay? "This is not a one-year anomaly," forecasts Anne Rickert, a Media Metrix analyst. "This is a head's up. Women have a very distinct presence online."

The Internet is growing significantly, by 22.4 percent during the last year. Dominating the growth were women and girls. The trend toward the feminization of the Web has been building since 1996, when women represented less than 40 percent of Internet users, says Rickert. The number of female users is likely to grow in the years ahead based on the trend that the number of female users grew by 34.9 percent last year.

Driving the trend has been the increased migration to the Internet by Gen Y girls; 125 percent more girls, aged 12 to 17 joined the Web in the first quarter of 2000, over the same quarter in 1999.

The survey found that female Netizens most frequently visited sites that reflected their lifestyles, predominantly those focusing on personal care. While men typically visit technology and "download" sites, women were more likely to frequent sites that are more mission critical - they want to save time and money, and expedite their chores. They want to buy such items as diapers, cosmetics, and clothes, while saving time, money and hunting trips to the mall.

How will the survey affect Web sites who want to target women? Two Net experts agree that women want ease of use, but sites trying to attract female consumers shouldn't count on women to hang around. A site's stickiness, the length of time that viewers spend noodling around on a site, may be important to its advertisers and investors, but it shouldn't contrive its features to cause female consumers to go hunting for what they want. Women are looking to spend less time, not more time, using the Web.

Melody Wigdahl-Hahn, founder of Womensnet.net, explains why. "Women are multi-taskers," says Wigdahl-Hahn. "The average woman has ten minutes to surf. She needs to be able to find and review about three new sources instead of sorting through thousands of things that aren't relevant to her. Anyone who wants to market services to women on the Internet had better keep time, ease of use, and multi-function in mind," advises Wigdahl-Hahn.

ZDNet's Jesse Burst agrees. "They (women) return to those that save them time and money. In fact, they are often more pressed for time than men. They go to sites with good information, get the information, make a purchase and leave," he writes. Burst points out that in a recent ZDNet Family PC survey of top women's community sites, the winning sites were those that were the easiest to read, had good interactive tools and an easy-to-use design.