Google+ Users Are Nearly All Male | Hacker News Reader

Google+ Users Are Nearly All Male

mashable.com

30 pointsssclafani25 comments

Tell it to my wife and daughter-in-law. But the mix isn't so surprising considering that every person on Google+ was invited by (recursively) someone who works at Google only a few weeks ago. Male geeks know a lot of male geeks. Male geeks are early adopters. Frankly, I think requiring users specify sex was a mistake for many reasons, not least of which are premature conclusions like this article.

"With around 60% of users identifying themselves as web developers or software engineers [...]"

That's probably the more interesting point

No, this is a god awful article. That's a new paragraph when it shouldn't be, that 60% is of the 25,000 single men (edit: No, it can't be even that, the author really messed up somewhere). There are not over 6,000,000 software engineers out of 10,000,000 on Google Plus.

Why not? Is it that hard to believe that 6 million of the people that joined Google Plus early on are software engineers? I could believe it. They probably signed up to try and get involved, and a developer would be more likely to sign up to beta software than a non-developer, I would imagine.

note: these are my speculations.

Why not? Is it that hard to believe that 6 million of the people that joined Google Plus early on are software engineers?

According to the BLS there are 3.2 million Americans in "Computer and mathematical occupations" (http://www.bls.gov/news.release/ocwage.htm), and there seems to be a reasonable consensus that 12 million is an upper bound for the world (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/453880/how-many-developer...). There's no way 6 million are on Google+ already.

over 40% of the top users listed on both sites cited by the article don't work as a software engineer. The majority of people I have in my circles are not software engineers. Assuming I am the average person then my own experience conflicts with that.

However that wasn't my point, neither of the sources they cite (findpeopleonplus.com, socialstatistics.com) back up this assertion. If you look at findpeopleonplus, it says out of the 947,996 people it has that 65,733 are an engineer/developer type. That's less than 10%.

(edit: No, it can't be even that, the author really messed up somewhere)

The only thing that makes any sense is that it's 60% of the people who listed their occupation. Even that seems high, but it might be plausible given that the initial invitees would have been the friends of Googlers.

Correct. When they did this analysis, only about 12% of the profiles they looked at listed an occupation at all.

http://www.findpeopleonplus.com/statistics

>With around 60% of users identifying themselves as web developers or software engineers

The other 40% are social media consultants.

Completely anecdotal counter-response:

In many of the social circles I move in (including the preponderance of my college friends, an extended music crowd here in LA, friends from high school when my focus was primarily sports, etc.) I either am or have often felt like a (the?) nerd among normals.

I enjoyed the opportunity to observe as a large group of people—regardless of their personal affinity for technology—attempted to determine how they were going to make Facebook a part of their lives when it went live my freshman year of college.

I joined Twitter during sxsw 2007 when its first big buzz (among us geeks) happened, then waited for the better part of two years before almost anyone I know IRL joined.

I've been watching closely the adoption rates on G+ within the confines of my unscientifically generated social network, and it's been interesting. No real observations yet, but in terms of raw numbers:

I've currently got over 100 people in circles, but less a cadre of internet personalities, there are 58 whom I know personally. 34 men. 24 women.

(ianastatistician)

"* = Based on a sample set of 29,215 Google+ Profiles."

And http://findpeopleonplus.com has "947,996 Google+ users indexed".

Maybe we should consider the fact that Google+ has more than 10M users now ? Also, you can hide your gender so the stats might be off.

As usual, flat wrong for my subset of Google+ Circles. Almost everywhere but on Hacker News (on Facebook too), my circle of online friends consists of married women with children, because a big part of my online communicating is about educating children, and that is a subject that skews to having more women than men follow it. I am seeing an exploding community of homeschoolers and teachers and parents whose children are in organizations for gifted children swelling my Google+ network.

I will agree that my networks, like most online networks, include more computer industry professionals by percentage than I regularly encounter in daily life in my neighborhood. It's not surprising that modes of communication that involve computers are more comfortable for people--male or female--who use computers to make a living.

It's definitely right for my circle of friends (and my Facebook is about 50/50 split).

To be fair, I know more tech-savvy (though not nerdy) men than women, so I could understand why most of my circle is largely dudes.

Interesting stats, but this was also reported on the 8th by a different site:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2742196

I would imagine if you looked at Facebook's signups shortly after it opened up to the public, it would probably look the same way (if you disregard the college students who were already on there at that point).

Just eyeballing the people in my circles who have actually created accounts, it seems like about a 60/40 male/female split. Most of my friends and classmates are pretty tech-savvy though (well, either that or I've browbeaten them into signing up for things so many times they just went for it this time).

Findpeopleonplus is set to release a larger set of index and statistics report. It will be interesting to see if the trend is along the same lines or shifted.

This is of no surprise to me, and I think we can all agree that its because of the technology oriented crowd. I'd actually be willing to bet the tech crowd is early adopters for most new software/services. The only reason we're hearing about it now is this information is accessible (mostly) to the public.

Not surprising. Any girl would be saying "Why do I need a second Facebook?"

All the women I socialize with regularly are on Google+, and not because I told them about it.

It's a limited beta, anyway. People will start joining when their Gmail tells them to.

You may be joking (I can't tell), but it's true that early adopters skew sharply male. Some estimates on various projects put the male/female ratio at 10:1 or even higher. If Google gets better than 30% female in this early beta period, I will be very impressed with their making-tech-attractive-to-women skillz.

Just like the people who bought Android phones specifically because they are Android phones.

My wife isn't.

Well if G+ is where the men are I expect you'll see a lot of women from Vancouver sign on pretty fast. Vancouver has way more single women than men.

Is this supposed to be a joke on the nature of those adult dating website ads that always advertise "Single ladies in your area"? Being in Vancouver myself, I never found out until recently that some of the ads always said "Vancouver" no matter where one was. Quite strange.

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