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Females Outnumber Males Online
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Sun Apr 15, 2007 09:31 AM
from the once-again-slashdot-is-abnormal dept.
from the once-again-slashdot-is-abnormal dept.
westcoaster004 writes "In news which may surprise some Slashdot users, females have been found to outnumber males online in the U.S. according to a report, and for some time. The statistics for Canadians show a slightly greater number of male users."
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Females Outnumber Males Online
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first male post (Score:5, Funny)
Re:first male post (Score:4, Funny)
What this actually means... (Score:5, Funny)
On the internet... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What this actually means... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.example.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 15 2002, @12:42PM)
Re:What this actually means... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://evil.google.com/)
That statement makes me wonder which one you were--the deceiver or the deceived.
Re:What this actually means... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What this actually means... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://ericdives.com/ | Last Journal: Monday June 12 2006, @12:11PM)
Those are not mutually exclusive.
Re:What this actually means... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What this actually means... (Score:5, Funny)
Sweetheart: I am wearing a red silk blouse, a miniskirt and high heels. I work out every day, I'm toned and perfect. My measurements are 36-24-36. What do you look like?
Wellhung: I'm 6'3" and about 250 pounds.I wear glasses and I have on a pair of blue sweat pants I just bought from Walmart.I'm also wearing a T-shirt with a few spots of barbecue sauce on it from dinner...it smells funny.
Sweetheart: I want you.Would you like to screw me?
Wellhung: OK
Re:What this actually means... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://johnstewien.spaces.live.com/)
Re:What this actually means... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
You gotta be real careful about that...
Some of those little girls actually are little girls. You go in there looking to fuck with some FBI agent's head just for fun, and you may run into a real little girl. And then she will seriously fuck with your head. Just for fun.
-
Re:What this actually means... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What this actually means... (Score:5, Funny)
Definition (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.tjerkstra.org/)
Age distribution? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Age distribution? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://lith.ath.cx/)
When you no longer feel compelled to assign a gender and race to a person for anything about that person, you also might find yourself not assuming things about this person. For anything about a specific person that you do not know, would you subconsciously start to fill the knowledge gap by drawing what you don't know from a stereotype?
Try this...(and only as an experiment), for people you don't know that you come across in your day (people on the street, customers at your business, customers over the phone, etc), try and guess what kind of music they like. Use whatever information you have about them to discern their music tastes (obviously without clueing them in that your doing this). But after you've made your guess, write down their seen (or perceived over the phone) skin color, gender, and music preference you came up with. You will probably want to keep this list of yours out of sight, or in a password protected word document or something. Spreadsheet maybe?
At the end of a few days, go through your list and first divide people up by gender, and group the males together, and the female together. For each gender, make a subgroup for each race (whites, blacks, asians, etc.). After that, go through and write down the different kinds of music you assigned (Country, rap, gospel, etc), and then after that, go back and tally up how many black males like X, or how many white females like Y, and so on. I'm almost certain that one music taste in particular will have a majority in each group. Like you might see that you have far more black females listening to gospel than any other kind of music in that group.
You now have a successfully stereotyped gender and race bias for music tastes. You have asked no one what they actually like, just what you think they would like to listen to. Since you didn't actually ask anyone what they liked, your list is probably highly inaccurate. But because you took the time to classify these people according to their gender and race, and then see what music they liked, you have willfully imposed a condition that requires you to discriminate based on race and gender. Should you do this test, you might conclude that had you not first identified their race and gender, your assumptions about their music tastes would be absolutely anyone's wild guess, because without their race and gender, you know nothing about that person, including their music tastes.
Since you didn't have any actual information, how did you have any faith in your guess even being remotely close to accurate? What gave you any confidence in your judgment? Since you had no information about a person, you had to have taken some of your guesswork from a preconceived notion of what you learned in life. For example, you probably were not consciously aware of it, but you limited all the possible types of music a person could enjoy, from what people of that race and gender you know already like. I bet your list will not have these entries...
- asian female -- salsa
- black male -- yodeling
- hispanic male -- polish folk
And you are probably thinking that those music tastes are absurd for those people, but do you think this because you have never heard or known an asian female to like salsa, a black male to like yodeling, or a hispanic male to like polish folk? Or doRe:Age distribution? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://lith.ath.cx/)
My aim in my previous post, was not "these kinds of people won't like this kind of music." That would be stereotypical of me, and I don't believe it to be true. My aim was to show that given no information, someone who was trying to guess another person's music tastes using only their race and gender would likely avoid linking, for example, a hispanic male with Polish folk.
I was trying to point out that since this made up list of ours is complete conjecture, we only have our stereotypes to look to when we try to label people. Because we are drawing our guesses from a stereotype, we're not going to put on the list something that doesn't match a stereotype.
I wrote what I did in my previous post, not to encourage, but to show the huge flaw in trying to categorize people when you don't actually know anything about them. I posted what I did to help people realize that labeling people is a bad practice, and I understand that the great grandparent post might have been sarcastic, but I think that if my reply helps just one person avoid prejudices, then it was worth my time to write it.
I must also say, that I'm not perfect and sometimes I find myself being prejudiced too. I try to stop myself when I catch it, but I make mistakes as well. I don't want anyone to feel that I'm trying to talk down to them. I don't want anyone to feel that I believe myself to be better than them.
I hope that better explains my post
Re:Age distribution? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Age distribution? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Age distribution? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.photobuck...4Web/Furniture4Sale/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 18 2005, @05:57PM)
And just how is this funny? Granny is no less a woman with her knitting needles than the young, hot, smoking blond of the average slashdotter's hopeless fantasies and probably has more sex than the average slashdotter anyway (with any being more than none).
And why isn't Granpa online and Granny is? Is Granny smarter than Granpa? Was Granny more able to adapt to online culture better? Why? Isn't it enough that she is able to search, navigate, compare, order and pay for her purchases? Isn't it enough that now she talks to her grandchildren every week through IM or email than never with snail mail and not being able to afford cross-country visits?
The fact that she is able to make use of the internet to improve or enjoy her life isn't enough? Granny has to be a programer, 3l33t haxor, network admin and security expert too? Does Granny have to be Uber Elder Geek to be counted as an online personage?
For people who are supposed to be geeks, you and the people who modded you up seem to be awfully narrow minded. Tech is not for just the people you think are worthy enough to be counted.
Re:Age distribution? (Score:5, Informative)
(Last Journal: Sunday February 04 2007, @03:47PM)
If this is true... (Score:5, Funny)
Baaaa... (Score:3, Funny)
"The statistics for Canadians show a slightly greater number of male users."
THis is compensated by a surprising number of sheep.
Re:Baaaa... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Baaaa... (Score:5, Funny)
http://www.cafepress.com/piggywig/2318364 [cafepress.com]
Re:Baaaa... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.jawtheshark.com/ | Last Journal: Saturday November 03, @08:32AM)
Did they mean..... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.youstockit.com/)
Fixed
Why does this remind me of an old IRC saying.....
"Welcome to IRC, where the Men are Men, the Women are Men, and the 14 Year Old Girls are FBI Agents"
Wow (Score:5, Funny)
Not supprising (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://flukkost.nu/blog/)
Males, on the other hand, like to play with stuff, build stuff, etc. Maybe the internet isn't that appealing to that crowd in the same way. Or maybe it is, but males actually get "done" with the internet, just like we usually finish a phone call in one minute, and go on to do something else instead.
Of course, that doesn't mean that there are more female hackers than male - hackers are people who use internet (and computers in general) to build stuff, and more males want to build stuff than females, and thus, there should be more male hackers than females.
"females have been found... (Score:3, Funny)
And I still can't find a date!
Posting as AC because I'm embarrased as hell.
Re:"females have been found... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://ettlz.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 12 2006, @06:53PM)
Neither can I, and I'm fucking proud of it.
This is Slashdot. The only thing to be embarrassed about here is poor spelling.
Article summary in case the link goes down... (Score:3, Funny)
Hopefully... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://dr-tools.sourceforge.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday January 23 2007, @10:27AM)
OMG ponies !
Females have more 'home' time on average (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/~nurb432/ | Last Journal: Friday August 27 2004, @03:24PM)
My own super accurate study: (Score:4, Funny)
Everywhere else: 1%
Additional stats: (Score:5, Funny)
(http://horsies.co.uk/)
Why is this surprising? (Score:5, Insightful)
2: Women are more likely to attend college than men. Virtually all college students are required to use the internet while they are there, and at least some will keep up the habit later.
3: Women are more likely to have desk jobs or other indoor jobs, which again often exposes them to the internet.
That being said, I think time spent on the internet is a much greater measure. I bet men spend far more time on the internet than women, despite the apparent data that says women dabble with it more often.
Re:Why is this surprising? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, jokes aside, I don't know about you guys(girls?) but I probably have as many, if not more female friends online than males. Obviously, all of the male geeks are online, but not all of the rest of the guys. On the other side, almost all of the females are online.
TFA doesn't say what "online" means (unless I'm dumb and missed it), so that kind of makes this entire discussion moot. Online gaming? Social Networking? Email? Internet Browsing? Voip? Online shopping? Without breaking that down by activity, that's kinda almost like a really, really expensive way to find out that there are more women then men.
Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.apaddedcell.com/)
This reminds me of my 12 year old neice who sites on MSN for hours at a time jibba-jabbin to her friends, whilst her brother would rather watch Hockey on TV.
This is good news for those people who've recently been ranting about there not being enough [meganmcdermott.com] women [mezzoblue.com] in web design [burningbird.net], and trying to work out the reasons why. With more women now online than men, the balance will hopefully be redressed (when that generation gets off MSN and wants to do something useful with their lives).
Facebook/Myspace's fault (Score:4, Funny)
duh. (Score:4, Insightful)
There may be more women than men. (Score:5, Funny)
As a Canadian... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.walford.ca/)
Still, the cat is out of the bag. We have large and sparsely populated country. By government mandate we are attempting to increase our populace by going online and luring the ladies to our glacial climate via online dating services!
This throws a wrench into our grand plan of luring the likes of nubile young women like "cuteie332" "betty22" and "chicky_54" here so we can increase our populace and dominate the earth with our floppy heads!
--- I need more coffee...
Simple (Score:4, Funny)
female what? male what? (Score:3, Funny)
We've known this all along... (Score:3, Funny)
Sorry couldn't resist
Not only that but... (Score:4, Funny)
Of course women outnumber men on-line. (Score:4, Funny)
What is the surprise? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I am online a lot... (Score:3)
(http://aqfl.net/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 09 2003, @01:16AM)
Re:Mmmmm...Goood... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://ettlz.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday February 12 2006, @06:53PM)
Re:Oh yeah... (Score:5, Informative)
A few choice ones:
#24: Pics or it never happened.
#26: Nobody knows the answer to "What is love?".
#29: Barrel Rolls can evade anything.
#32: There is a market for any kind of porn.
#34: There is porn of it, no exceptions.
#37: There are no girls on the internet.
#50: If you die in the game, you die for real.
#52: Developers, developers, developers, developers.
#54: Snape killed dumbledore.
#55: "Winner" is actually spelled "WinRar"
#65: You will be reported to AOL if you steal pictures.
#71: If you fap to it and acheive orgasm, you must tell everyone.
#72: Everything on eBaumsworld is stolen. No exceptions.
#73: Believe everything you read on the internet.
#75: There is always a female version of a male character. No exceptions.
#76: Duke Nukem Forever must never be released or the whole of the interent will collapse.
#78: It's been cracked and pirated. No exceptions.
#82: Upgrading someone's RAM is a sign of goodwill.
#87: If you would have sex with it, let everyone know.
God damn I spend too much time on 4chan.
Male & female porn (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Saturday November 03, @10:54PM)
I disagree. Most visual porn (an overwhelming majority) is targeted towards straight men, this is true. But to most women, good porn is a trashy romance novel, not a playboy. And if you've ever looked at the "romantic fiction" online, you'll see a pretty good number written by women.