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]

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

[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.

[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.