Perhaps because social media developed so rapidly, we have yet to calibrate how we gauge its actual importance. We have not really understood the extent to which online opinion reflects genuine public opinion, and how a trending hashtag translates into real world leverage. As a result, I think we are granting disproportionate real world leverage to momentary chatter across social media platforms.
When 10% of Twitter users are responsible for 80% of all tweets, and 65% of that 10% are women; we are clearly not talking about a representative sample of the general population.
Arguably, we are not even talking about a representative sample of women, since, for example, married, working mothers are less likely to be compulsive tweeters than, say, women who are younger, single, and idle.
So the question is, to what extent does what happens on Twitter even matter in the real world? The same question applies across all platforms. I would guess that social media marketers would be in the best position to answer this question.