gender stats

[rainbow]

(I tried to post this yesterday, but managed to post only in my ownjournal -- yay brainfog!! And if this isn't the right place to post about it, let me know. The brian fog lives on)

I've just realised the gender stats ignore "Unspecified" in the breakdown.

It says:

Gender
The gender breakdown of our account holders:

* Female 14258 (85.1%)
* Male 2149 (12.8%)
* Other 349 (2.1%)
* Unspecified 10042

But running the numbers I get this:

* Female 14258 (53.2%)
* Male 2149 (8.0%)
* Other 349 (1.3%)
* Unspecified 10042 (37.5%)

Leaving out unspecified seems like it skews it a lot -- only the people who state they identify as male or female or don't mind being "other"ed are counted -- but the people who don't fit in those categories are 37.5% of the userbase.

I also note that the choice on the profile is "Rather not say", not "Unspecified", and those mean very different things to me.

~Carys

Comments

[rho]

Yeah. Go ahead and change the "unspecified" on the stats page to "rather not say" and add a note to the description on the gender field to say that the percentages are only the percentages of the people who have chosen to say.

I suspect that we'll keep things working the same, only recording the percentages of people we actually have information about, because it seems like the more intuitive way of doing things to me. I'll ask denise for an official pronouncement, though.

[vampwillow]

I don't think they are the same though. "Rather not say" implies there is an answer but not for publication, "unspecified" could as easily mean that there isn't one (community, multiple, etc)

[rho]

Right. The problem at the moment is that there are different labels on different pages. When it's collected, it's "rather not say" and then when it's reported back it's "unspecified". We want to change it so it says the same thing in both places.

[denise]

http://bugs.dwscoalition.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1176 :)

[rho]

Which only goes to show how useless my intuitions are. :)

[rainbow]

\o/

[azurelunatic]

Are things like OpenID included in this, where it can be genuinely Unspecified rather than Rather Not Say?

[denise]

We'll be splitting all of the stats by account type, so you'll be able to see which type of account fits into which category. (I'm not sure, but I think OpenID accounts can't specify a gender either.)

[rainbow]

Done and done.

[rho]

Woot!

[rainbow]

And I'd like to woot! for the speediness of proofers, as well, because my changes were approved less than 1 minute after I made them, I think!

[vampwillow]

When registering communities I ensure to not select a gender. Maybe others do too? (Maybe 'not relevant/community' should be an option?)

[damned_colonial]

Now I have the urge to go and mark all my comms as female ;)

[vampwillow]

I have the same urge, I just try to stop myself (except on single-gendered-member comms, obviously)

[denise]

Gender is only specifiable for personal accounts. :)

[vampwillow]

/me goes to look

/me apologises profusely

How the hell did I think it had gender there? Very weird - I would have sworn it was in the creation process!

/me puts down the drink

[denise]

Hee. LJ has it -- it's one of the things that we patched.

[sine_nomine]

Am I allowed to say here that this is just one of the myriad of things I love about all of y'all, and about Dreamwidth?! That you've taken the time to fix teh stoopid....

[azurelunatic]

I'm wondering if OpenID, especially including OpenIDs from imported commenters/friends, are being counted in the Unspecified, because that would mean a genuine Unspecified for those who have not ever logged in via OpenID at Dreamwidth and poked at their settings.

[rainbow]

I was assUming it was actual Dreamwidth registered accounts, since the total is ~28,000, while the total number of accounts is 314,431.

But good grief that makes a lot of OpenID and comm accounts! Maybe from the importation of years of comments?

[axelrod]

don't mind being "other"ed are counted

It's not that I don't mind being othered, but I'd rather specify that I am in fact Other than pretend it doesn't matter. Visibility - I'm here, I'm queer - *really* queer.