Do you have a game console like Xbox fifa coins or PlayStation?" According to the results, 40 percent of adults answered yes. When you broke down the data further, 37 percent of men said they did, and 42 percent of women. That's a change from 2010, when researchers asked the same question and found that 45 percent of men and 40 percent of women had a console.

The problem occurs when we try to generalize this to a meaningful social trend. Unlike cellphones or laptops, game consoles aren't really personal electronic devices. They're closer to televisions. So if one person in a household buys an Xbox or PlayStation, it's fairly likely that another adult in that house will report "having" the item

 whether or not they purchased it or use it. If Pew calls a single-gender household or a person living alone, the data splits up neatly. But as of 2012, only around 15 percent of American households were women living alone, and 12 percent were men living alone. (Married couples, with or without children, made up around 48 percent.)

Pew gives us a good raw number for overall console prevalence, and things like race and income level tend to be shared in a household. But the gender data doesn't quite answer the question we're asking by proxy: whether a larger proportion of women than men are buying and playing console games. I asked Pew's research team about the breakdown

 and the response was noncommittal they're capturing numbers, after all, not doing sociological analysis. "We strive to write our questions in straightforward language so that people can easily answer them," read the response. www.hellofifa.com "In some cases like this, there may be interpretation left to the respondent. If they think they 'own' a game console, whether or not they bought it, then we capture them as game console owners."