It's a man's man's LJ
On the flight back from California, I read Claire Brialey's piece in the latest Banana Wings about feminism and (amongst other things) fandom. Claire was polite enough not to finger me as the unnamed fan who, in worrying about the lack of LOCs from women to his fanzine, attributed Claire's article about the same issue in an earlier Banana Wings to her male co-editor, Mark Plummer. Hoist on my own petard, as I said to Claire when she called me on it here on LJ at the time.
As I was thinking about the issue of female participation in fanzines after reading Claire's piece, I got to wondering about whether the percentages are any better in online communities. I still haven't done a gender count of the Chunga mailing list, but I've just gone through my LJ Friends list. Ignoring communities, people who have died, and people I don't know (and thus don't know their gender), and counting people with multiple accounts only once, I came up with 77 male Friends and 48 female Friends. That's 62% male, 38% female. Well, it's better than the percentages for people who write LOCs to Chunga! (Although I suppose the proper comparison there would be people who comment on my LJ.) I wonder how this compares to other peoples' counts. Anybody willing to do the work on their own Friends lists?
Okay, this is kind of weird: On Facebook I have 115 male Friends and 74 female. That's 61% male, 39% female. Those percentages are scarily close to the LJ percentages.
(And don't worry, Claire (and Mark), I *am* going to try to turn this into a LoC.)
As I was thinking about the issue of female participation in fanzines after reading Claire's piece, I got to wondering about whether the percentages are any better in online communities. I still haven't done a gender count of the Chunga mailing list, but I've just gone through my LJ Friends list. Ignoring communities, people who have died, and people I don't know (and thus don't know their gender), and counting people with multiple accounts only once, I came up with 77 male Friends and 48 female Friends. That's 62% male, 38% female. Well, it's better than the percentages for people who write LOCs to Chunga! (Although I suppose the proper comparison there would be people who comment on my LJ.) I wonder how this compares to other peoples' counts. Anybody willing to do the work on their own Friends lists?
Okay, this is kind of weird: On Facebook I have 115 male Friends and 74 female. That's 61% male, 39% female. Those percentages are scarily close to the LJ percentages.
(And don't worry, Claire (and Mark), I *am* going to try to turn this into a LoC.)