Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge Gender thing

Just curious

Why are about 90% of the membership here male? (maybe a higher percentage)

Is this because men like to discuss things with other men before starting to tackle a technical problem whereas women just get on with the task in hand?

Or because, apparently, it's the male in the household who sorts out the technical issues and the female who lets him get on with it?

I'm just curious - as ever. Not a big deal and certainly not in any way sexist.

Bensheim,

Just an initial thought on your question – there is a difference between the FineTunedMac membership and those who have made one or more posts here. A member, as well as unregistered visitors, can use the FTM Search function to see if the site contains information or solutions they need. In some instances, posting is not needed to answer a question or solve a problem.

Hi Dianne



what does any of that have to do with gender?

Baffled Bensheim

Ooh, tricky topic ...

'Gender' is first and foremost a grammatical term, even if it is nowadays showing up as a PC (= politically correct) term for 'sex' (as a noun rather than a verb).

And in general a thing would be neuter. How many of our members would wish to be known as sexless?

I think dianne's point was that the fact that a large percentage of active posters are men doesn't mean that as large a percentage of member are. Since only about a quarter of our registered members have posted even once, it's not unreasonable to imagine that the gender breakdown of those who haven't posted isn't the same.

Beyond that, I'm not sure I'd trust the statistical estimate of someone who's just established the precedent of mistaking one of our female members for a male.

Weeeeeeell it's like this see, I was born male, called male, chose to stay male and yep even dressed male.

Which is why I am male and more than 90% male

Hi, Bensheim
I was attempting to reply to your question to say that there are actually three categories of males and females at FTM: the two clarified by dkmarsh – members and posters – and users, those who are not registered nor posting but are using the Search function.

Three quarters of those who have registered here have never posted? So if there's 80 members then 60 of them have never posted? I wonder why they registered for membership, since the only thing which a lurker cannot see is avatars. i.e., that's the only change when one logs in. Everything else is in plain view.

How do you know that? Statcounter?

Last time I counted (a day or two ago) we had 457 members, of whom 114 had posted at least once.

At MFIF, we had many thousands of members who'd posted very infrequently (if ever). I often found myself shocked when noticing that an unfamiliar user name with a New User title had a registration date from 7 or 8 years ago. I gradually came to understand that many folks had registered to ask a specific question, then tucked the fact of their membership away and saved it for future use as necessary.

I suspect that a number of the registrants here who haven't posted are former MFIF members who simply found out that the MFI Forums were closing/had closed, noted that FTM was their self-appointed successor (a fact discoverable in several different locations), and opted to take the time to join so they'd be members if and when they needed help with Mac issues. In fact, I do recognize quite a few of these thus-far mute usernames from MFIF.

457 members! That's a huge number for such a new forum.

Respect!

But can you open the pod-bay doors (a bit) to let us see some of these fascinating statistics?

One vote for that theory here... I'm also the designated keeper of iCal, programmer of VCR/DVR devices, and formerly the only loader of film in the camera. That last one is a running joke. She just didn't want to do it.

Kate

As a long time member of MacFixit I will no doubt do here as I did there - come to ask but usually find the answer before posting.

. As the only mac user in our household no way would I let a Windows person, man, or woman, touch my mac.

We girls don’t have time to talk about whatever, not when thanks to macs we can just read here and then go do, but we do read, learn, and often laugh at the other half.