Slashdot Mirror
Females Outnumber Males Online
westcoaster004 writes "In news which may surprise some Slashdot users, females have been found to outnumber males online in the U.S. according to a report, and for some time. The statistics for Canadians show a slightly greater number of male users."
It wasn't the first, and it definately won't be the last.
Males lying about being females outnumbers males telling the truth online.
Before I believe any of that I want to see what they define as 'female' and 'online'.
-- Cheers!
I don't see any age distribution in TFA (just "over 3"), but I have a sneaking suspicion that 2/3 of those are over the age of 50. In other words, granny discovered e-mail and how to order knitting needles online.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
My fellow men, do not worry at all. For our members of the other sex (read females), it's mostly gossip.
I, for one, welcome our new online female overladies!
"The statistics for Canadians show a slightly greater number of male users."
THis is compensated by a surprising number of sheep.
..no one really knows you're a dog.
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
Fixed
Why does this remind me of an old IRC saying.....
"Welcome to IRC, where the Men are Men, the Women are Men, and the 14 Year Old Girls are FBI Agents"
YouStockIt - Education through Unorthodox Methods
I didn't know the FBI had that many agents.
I don't think this is supprising. Females are more social creatures than males. I won't say wheather this is biologic or social, but right here, right now, most of them are. Females in their teens are known to talk on the phone FOREVER. Females are known to sit around and gossip all the time. Computers are now straightforward enough to use so that a new user don't have to figure out how it works (typical male behaviour), but instead, can go straight to $chat_network or $social_website and start to gossip. They use internet because it helps them do what they like to do outside of computers.
Males, on the other hand, like to play with stuff, build stuff, etc. Maybe the internet isn't that appealing to that crowd in the same way. Or maybe it is, but males actually get "done" with the internet, just like we usually finish a phone call in one minute, and go on to do something else instead.
Of course, that doesn't mean that there are more female hackers than male - hackers are people who use internet (and computers in general) to build stuff, and more males want to build stuff than females, and thus, there should be more male hackers than females.
...to outnumber males online"
And I still can't find a date!
Posting as AC because I'm embarrased as hell.
Females outnumber males online. Night elves outnumber Orcs and Dwarves, but Goblins received an unexpected surge in popularity after Draenei were nerfed in the last update. Figures for Tauren have remained more or less stable, and no figures for Trolls are available as they ate the census-takers.
--
just fyi... I'm a woman.
...is still around 99.97% targeted towards the male. When THAT number slips below 50%, THEN I'll believe more women are online. It's either that, or 3 out of 4 women online are bisexual and are looking at all that "man" pr0n. Pick your fantasy.
I, for one, welcome our new female overlords!
Invoke conscription for females and send them to Iraq. That should even things up a little!
on Slashdot we're still between real men !
OMG ponies !
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Not a slam on 'stay at home moms' in the least, but there are more of those then 'stay at home dads', so just purely by the #'s there is a better chance of them finding some time to be online during the day then the males of the population.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Percentage of female internet population on myspace.com: 99%
Everywhere else: 1%
Slashdot is Canadian!
I figured it out! They're counting all the ChatSpam Bots!
Damn those seductive vixens!
YouStockIt - Education through Unorthodox Methods
Figures also show that 90% of females online are 18, horny and want to sex you up.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
I hear they're on the rise... like the uh... silent conservative majority or something.
1: There are more females than males
2: Women are more likely to attend college than men. Virtually all college students are required to use the internet while they are there, and at least some will keep up the habit later.
3: Women are more likely to have desk jobs or other indoor jobs, which again often exposes them to the internet.
That being said, I think time spent on the internet is a much greater measure. I bet men spend far more time on the internet than women, despite the apparent data that says women dabble with it more often.
This reminds me of my 12 year old neice who sites on MSN for hours at a time jibba-jabbin to her friends, whilst her brother would rather watch Hockey on TV.
This is good news for those people who've recently been ranting about there not being enough women in web design, and trying to work out the reasons why. With more women now online than men, the balance will hopefully be redressed (when that generation gets off MSN and wants to do something useful with their lives).
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
"... males have been found to outnumber males online in the U.S. ... The statistics for Canadians show a slightly greater number of male users."
There's your answer then. The Canadians are busy chatting up your women.
The reason for this is likely Facebook and Myspace. These social networking sites make is really easy to simply log onto one site, do all the chit-chat with 10-20 people that would normally take 5 minutes per person, and then log off. When I go to the computer lab at my university, a quick peek at women's computer screens shows that 7 out of 10 computer screens are of Facebook, and 2 out of 10 are of Myspace. The remaining 10% are of actual class webpages. On the other hand, 6 out of 10 male computer screens are of ESPN, NCAA, or Facebook/Myspace. Okay I didn't really look at the guys at all.
um, hello? This is news? One word - "shopping."
Do they run Linux?
There may be more women than men online, however they all come in the .jpg format.
Was this a survey at Amazon?
As a Canadian I am infurated by this article. This was classifed Canadian government information. As such, only Canadians were supposed to know that more women were online - and the fact that more Canadian men were aware of this, as the data shows is no excuse for giving away our secrets!
Still, the cat is out of the bag. We have large and sparsely populated country. By government mandate we are attempting to increase our populace by going online and luring the ladies to our glacial climate via online dating services!
This throws a wrench into our grand plan of luring the likes of nubile young women like "cuteie332" "betty22" and "chicky_54" here so we can increase our populace and dominate the earth with our floppy heads!
--- I need more coffee...
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
The internet has lots of pluses and all, but I can't see how being online more is something to necessarily brag about, considering that this online social interaction may start to take the place of social interaction in the real world; less energy spent surfing the net possibly means more obesity, etc.; a great place to develop obsessions (e.g. hypochondriacs); also a great place to mess up your eating habits, etc.
Perhaps they mean more women are featured online on web sites. I would believe that in a second.
Please? ;)
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
What are females?
Women have been known to make use of the phone for entertainment purposes (talking to their friends) much longer hours probably since the phone was invented. I bet that most denizens of internet chat rooms are female.
Yeah, they don't even take into consideration Rule 37.
Tits or GTFO.
Everyone bone up on their pick-up lines! Anyone got any good ones I could borrow?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
They have taken their husband hunting online.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Rule 37: There are no girls on the internet....ever.
Typical sloppy journalism, not specifying the species.
we will end no whine before its time
\ I'm personally glad to see the online world better reflect the real wolrd with proportionate representation from all groups. But I wouldn't trust simple surveys. I'd rather see something from the US Bureau of the Census asking "how many times in the past month" and "how long average session".
Now, was that females online, or images of females online?
I know which study I'd prefer to be responsible for.
... It's because Americans are a bunch of girls
:p
Sorry couldn't resist
Sorry. :)
Just because it can't be explained doesn't mean it isn't true. Science fits into reality... not the other way around.
I disagree. Most visual porn (an overwhelming majority) is targeted towards straight men, this is true. But to most women, good porn is a trashy romance novel, not a playboy. And if you've ever looked at the "romantic fiction" online, you'll see a pretty good number written by women.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
Whew. I'm glad I don't have to turn off the AJAX (with it on, I can only seem to reply to comments, not articles).
I would be much more interested if some sort of weighting were used. It's nice to know how many people use the internet *at all*, but I'm more interested in how many have a significant amount of their social lives on the web.
I'd like to see statistics just on the blogscape, comparing total readership of male and female blogs.
With the typical women who spend most of their time online, they probably outweigh online males too...
..yah i know, OMG, a girl is on Slashdot. The world has now ended.
Rule 37 of what?
We all know that at least 69% of those "females" are really 40+ year old guys living in their parent's basement, or 15- year old guys living in their parent's basement.
The proof: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/17/27
(from a
The Ferengi rules of acquisition of course!
This tagline was transcoded to result in at least one smirk. If you experience failure to smirk, please consult your Gen
Yeah, what was he thinking???
IT'S A TRAP!
Sorry, but I think for the most part, they are probably using MSN Messenger, and MySpace... MSN being the default, and MySpace being the culmination of every advancement in communication ability through technology (*NOT*)...
[RANT]
Okay, we start with bbsing, local, community oriented... Actual get togethers, regular parties, etc... then the early internet, IRC, ICQ, and AOL a little more remote and disconnected, but still some actual community and real people, generally those you already know in real life... The internet boom, ICQ is all but dead, IRC is a wasteland of people in idle, and AOL doesn't see nearly as much use of what many people went to it for in the first place (group chat and profile searching).... So what is the culmination of all these advancements in technology? fucking myspace.
[/RANT]
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Now take those numbers, and multiply by the amount of time spent online :P (TFA is counting anyone who's touched the internet, at all, in the past month, as "online"...)
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
"Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?"
we'll talk again when they take myspace and livejournal out of the count.
I think it's importaint to point out that according to the 2000 census there were slightly more women living in the US then men. Also in general men are slightly more likely to enlist in the US army, and since the country is at war then that would leave even more women outnumber men in internet use.
Once you've thought about that, think of all the initiatives trying to get women interested in computers and computer sciences:h tml
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~wics/
http://www.cs.ubc.ca/wccce/program04/Papers/mark.
http://math.rice.edu/~lanius/club/girls.html
http://www.awc-hq.org/
We're defiantly not doing those things for young men.
Then due to a natural progression, if you're going to use a computer at all you might as well be online. So of course there's more women using the internet than men.
And don't forget that population of young women addicted to those "women run alt-pornography sites" like the suicide girls and gods girls etc.
Women on-line out-number men? Of course...look at any of the pictures, you'll see two, sometimes three or four women in the picutre with just one guy. What? You weren't talking about the pictures? Oh...nevermind.
we have more opportunity!
Engineering is the art of compromise.
A lot of the psychology forums (lots of them) are young girls - so are the diary sites like Live Journal etc. Young people in general don't always know how to interpret what they are feeling but girls will be more conscious of their emotions and and want to discuss them in diaries and journals. Forums that have "Secrets" groups or threads are always hugely popular (people express a secret thought using photos and captions usually). In the negative, the "pro" eating disorder sites are also 98% girls - and there are mobs of them. The fan sites and art sites like deviantART are also mostly girls. I find the computer and gaming sites to be mostly guys as one would expect but most forums seem they are mostly young girls and women - some drastically so. One thing about these groups is it brings them online a lot and while posting and MSNing they are visiting other sites and forums that they learn about from each other. There are a lot of young people online and its the girls who want to talk and write about a lot of things with their peers. They are also the best typists (and piano players). A lot of guys get a bit spooked by a keyboard.
GTFO Tripfag
VIOLATION OF RULE 1!
RULE 5 WILL BE ENFORCED.
~desu
In related news, women have been found far more likely to take surveys online.
Nathan Friedly
Before I believe any of that I want to see what they define as 'female'
Yup, most slashdotters have a problem defining it. I'll define it as "someone who has different stuff than you between their legs" and leave you to ponder what it possibly might look like;)
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
The article does not explain by what going online means (i.e.- Is it checking email, doing research, shopping, charring, or /.ing?). I am surprised at the number of responses that assume that women are only online to chat or use Facebook.
Consider that more women than men earn high school, associates, bachelors, masters, law, medical, and PhD degrees. And while more men than women are still university department chairs, more women tahn men are now the editors of academic journals. Who then is going to naturally be using the web for research (Other than for pictures of Milla Jovovich)? Women are the ones that are beginning to contol the direction of research and ideas. We men should hope that they nice to us, have a good sense of humor, and that they do not hold a grudge for our behavior.
_____________________
You may all go to hell, I am going to Texas - Davy Crockett
You may all go to Hell and I will go to Texas - Davy Crockett
Slashdotters sure know a lot about women!
I am not sure that any demographic should be particularly proud of wasting their time on /. and digg.
I am not.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Also, see Rule 21.
Have gnu, will travel.
Gays outnumber females who outnumber males.
You catch her eye across the room. With a sly grin, you motion for her to walk over to you. It's a simple "I want you over here" hand gesture not unlike -- for a point of reference -- that used by Morpheus in The Matrix duing that famous fight scene.
She crosses the room; now she's standing close to you. "If I could make you come with my finger," you say, "Just imagine what I can do with my whole hand?"
And if it's a truly exceptional girl, the kind who's really your type, she might appreciate one of these:
"Baby, can I be your DNA helicase? 'Cause I want to unzip your genes."
"I wish I were your derivative, so I could lie tangent to your curves."
"If you're sine squared, I want to be cosine squared -- so that together we can be one."
Or, after you've known her for a bit, you could just say something sweet like, "Life without you is like a vector space in which the Cauchy sequence does not converge."
one user I know, she's ugly like a bag of a chopped liver, and yet very active on web forum "Sexy woman" or something like that. I guess her case is a good explanation why web is dominated by females.
My favorite rules:
Rule 112: Never have sex with the boss's sister.
Rule 113: Always have sex with the boss.
Horns are really just a broken halo.
The rules of the internet. Give arbitrary numbers. The fad started after the infamous "Rule #34" image macro started circulating.
A few choice ones:
#24: Pics or it never happened.
#26: Nobody knows the answer to "What is love?".
#29: Barrel Rolls can evade anything.
#32: There is a market for any kind of porn.
#34: There is porn of it, no exceptions.
#37: There are no girls on the internet.
#50: If you die in the game, you die for real.
#52: Developers, developers, developers, developers.
#54: Snape killed dumbledore.
#55: "Winner" is actually spelled "WinRar"
#65: You will be reported to AOL if you steal pictures.
#71: If you fap to it and acheive orgasm, you must tell everyone.
#72: Everything on eBaumsworld is stolen. No exceptions.
#73: Believe everything you read on the internet.
#75: There is always a female version of a male character. No exceptions.
#76: Duke Nukem Forever must never be released or the whole of the interent will collapse.
#78: It's been cracked and pirated. No exceptions.
#82: Upgrading someone's RAM is a sign of goodwill.
#87: If you would have sex with it, let everyone know.
God damn I spend too much time on 4chan.
"Using linux is like a game, if you're able to make it run better than Windows, you're winning" - Unknown slashdotter.
Any idea how well those programs actually work? Let me give you some examples from my own experiences as a female interested in computers.
The only reason my university has such a "high" percentage of women attending (25-30%) is because of our business program; I am one of three women (and I believe that one of the other two was thinking about switching) in my class in CompE (there's something like 30-40 students in CompE per class year). That's about average for my university; though, we've never had zero women in CompE. All engineers take a general engineering course (if you can call learning MATLAB engineering), so you'd think that the male-female ratio might be better; it's barely better. There is one other woman in my lecture section (approx. 20 students total) and two other women in my lab section (approx. 25 students total).
Some women leave computer engineering, electrical engineering and computer science (maybe other tech/engineering majors as well, but these are the ones I'm most familiar with) because of the men in the class, and sometimes the professor, making fun of them in various ways (for example, saying the only reason they got into the major was because they're female and the school has to fill a quota). Personally, it wasn't until I got to college that I met any asshole-men that didn't want women around, and that wasn't even until this semester (second semester); I was told that I should switch my major to what all engineering, science and mathematics majors here consider the easiest major (business) and that I shouldn't give our mutual (male) friend any STDs.
Those programs are working very, very slowly, and they benefit every science, math and tech major other than electrical and computer engineering, even though every program I've been in that tries to help minorities in science and engineering are predominantly female. There are also initiatives that accept men; one I attended was aimed at all of the minorities in science and technology, so that would include some men. As a note, the programs I was in aren't what got me into computers; it was that I grew up around computers with a father that was happy to teach me what he could about computers (he does computer support).
People still have a negative view of women and computers, most often thinking that a woman just can't use a computer or know more than the basics. Hell, even I assume that a female knows jack-all about computers until shown otherwise. When that image changes, and it is changing slowly, more women will realize that tech majors might actually be viable path for them.
As for why there is a larger percentage of women online, I'd attribute that to MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites, as well as instant messengers; not because more women are getting into computer-related majors/careers. You don't need to know how to use a computer or be "internet savvy" to use those sites. Probably the most difficult thing on those sites is when you upload images from your computer.
... and I am a worker ant that is classified females. [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Is that RMS? My EYES!!
I absolutely would not rule this combination out. Not only is salsa quite popular in Korea (last I checked), and there is an all-female salsa band from Japan that is quite good, but I have played on gigs at many salsa clubs with many bandmates. The majority are, naturally, Hispanic males. But the regular rotation has also included Asian, Hispanic, and white women, and men of every race. (The one constant would be that if they don't speak Spanish, they won't be singing. Pretty simple.) The crowds have included people of every description, from gay gang-bangers to Jerry Buss. These tend to polarize based on the venue rather than the music.
/. say "I don't watch TV" or "I don't care about movies". Same idea here. There are also people who judge music on how well they can dance to it, rather than how good the music is.
I would be more inclined to judge someone's musical tastes on the way they dress (as this is an outward sign of their social group) and perhaps the language(s) they speak than on anything else. In a business setting, I don't even attempt to guess. It's much easier to just wait until I either hear what they choose, or see how they respond to music they didn't choose -- such as whatever I have playing.
Also bear in mind that some people really don't care all that much about music. I know that may seem unbelievable, but look at how many people on
Finally, is it so hard to ask someone "what do you listen to?" It's a good way to engage in conversation without much risk of raising an uncomfortable topic, and possibly a way to expand your own horizons.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Ah, I wish I had mod points for you. Unfortunately, most posts regarding discrimination I've seen on /. get more knee-jerk defensiveness than honest consideration, but maybe you'll get different?
Sometimes I wonder if the focus on keeping womens' numbers in tech equal isn't a misguided attempt at attacking a symptom of a larger problem in education. I can understand a desire to get different sorts of minds and thinking styles tackling the same problem in any science, and that a large cross-section of brain types would probably involve more balanced gender statistics, but wouldn't it be better to cater to different learning styles instead of enforcing aid programs and quotas with the hope that the simple presence of more women will magically alter things? Most tech education is currently heavily geared toward independent kinesthetic learners. Tinkerers. And while it's true that they may have a natural strength in these fields, I don't think we should underestimate the ways a more "right-brained" individual could bring in different perspectives, ideas, and innovation. And I think an easy solution to test would be to teach to different learnign styles. Social learners, visual lingual learners, aural learners. They're all pretty much left out to dry by all the current common methods. Unfortunately, I can't think of a way to present this to a school board without it getting spun as some new way of making school easier for girls and harder for boys. Oh well, maybe we'll evolve enough to figure it all out someday.
/. nerd are out numbered and still can't score.
Two Towers-Two Worlds.One seeks triumphs and freedom for man.The other deems man unworthy and wrecks them.
Wow...
Bitch++
Having worked with a few female engineers and listened to the stories about the difficulties manufactured by e.g. senior male engineering faculty at the universities, I sympathize with a lot of what you're saying, but I have to raise the point that women in the US are not exactly a minority, population-wise. Last I heard, and for as far back as I can remember (decades), there have consistently been slightly more women in the US than men. I feel that addressing programs for women as programs for minorities is a bit of a misnomer, in that respect. I think it would be more accurate to say "programs for the disadvantaged" since I have never seen anything in 40-some-odd years to indicate that women are not still discriminated against pretty much from birth when it comes to technical, intellectual, and political disciplines...
Lucky you...
I found more and more over the years that it is safest to apply this assumption to everyone - most of the men I know who try to portray themselves as "experts" are typically no more tech savvy than e.g. my mother, my wife, or my daughter. It's kinda pathetic, in a way, but tis very true.
One observation I would put forward regarding women in tech fields: Most of the women I do know who have good knowledge of e.g. computers typically will not say so. Women are far more likely - again, this is in my personal experience - to claim to know "nothing" about computers even if they already have a good knowledge base in the field. Men, on the other hand, will take a little knowledge and try to balloon it into looking like something more than it really is.
"The Internet is made of cats."
Before the internet they used the stupid telephone to talk a lot of shit with other womans. Now they slowly realized that they can use the internet to talk a lot of shit too. That's not news.
My cousin played for a while in an all-girl CounterStrike clan (in fact, she was the one who introduced me to CS:S). She was a great player, but eventually stopped playing because she was so sick of the taunts and abuse coming from other (male) players. In all likelihood these were things that no one would ever say in real life or face to face.
She said she liked CS, but it just wasn't worth the hurt.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
you need to re-read rules 1 & 2 also cocks
you forgot rule 2
Back when I went to University and computer science was a subset of the mathematics department (and modula-2 was the future) there were more women enroled in that than men - a big surprise considering how few girls did enough mathematics in high school then to be eligible. In countrast the engineering department I was in had less than 4 percent female enrolement. Most of the women I studied engineering with moved into IT since then - but it still appears to be a feild almost devoid of women. Where did they all go?
To bad most online people don't understand the above subjectline ;-)
Should be;
48% male
22% female
30% gay males that whant you to think they are female.
I for one welcome our female internet-using overlords!
Rules one and two. Why do you insist on breaking them? GTFO
There are four types of lies on the internet: lies, damned lies, statistics, and boobies.
It's because we're slowly but surely taking over the world.
LURK MOAR
It raises the probability of us males gettin laid with a female by contacting people on the internet !!
Good thing I'm happyly married ! lusers
I'm positive, don't belive me look at my karma
http://www.pictars.com/users/Beau/040428008%20copy .jpg
I thought everyone knew this...
My mom is a twice-over granny and she plays more City of Heroes than you do.
(and no, she's not my childrens' granny. My sister is not a geek so she managed to get married and have kids before I was even out of college.)
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
I don't see any age distribution in TFA
The traditional form of the poll question is "A/S/L?", correct?
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
...more females like to answer surveys about their online habits...
and they ALL have mastered Photoshop.
From bash.org
:) ;-) ;) :-D ....
(JHawk111420) Hey whats up, a/s/l?
(Lady Renegade) more than you want, I'm sure
(JHawk111420) ill take that as a challenge
(Lady Renegade) take it any way you want sweetie
(JHawk111420) k, how old are ya?
(Lady Renegade) probably too old for you, but let's pretend I'm 20
(JHawk111420) k, what do ya look like?
(Lady Renegade) before or after I'm dressed up?
(JHawk111420) both
(Lady Renegade) well......after I'm dressed up, I have long sexy red hair, nails painted red to match the slinky dress I have on, stiletto heels, pouty lips, green eyes, boobs out to here, and a smile that stops traffic
(JHawk111420) and before your dressed up?
(Lady Renegade) before I'm dressed up, I'm bald and wearing boxers...sometimes my weenie is peeking out
(Lady Renegade) hello?
(Lady Renegade) hello?
(Lady Renegade) hello
That's all fine and well, but when was the last time you had a argument with a man that had PMT
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Considering as someone once put it;
"Bad command or file name" is about as informative as "If you don't know what you did wrong, I'm not going to tell you".
Of course the part left out of the article is that most of the males were too slow to respond.
In 50% of the cases, Reasons ranged from "one handed typing", "sticky keys" and "fapping"... census takers were
not sure how, or if they wanted to respond after cleaning their keyboards for the sixth time.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
Well, about half of the girls at my school say they spend 3+ hours on AIM. But, I aggree, males do outnumber females on the internet.