Thought this was interesting.

How to ge more women to join the debate
http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/how-to-get-more-women-to-join-the-debate/?_r=2

>"Women were clearly underrepresented in my data. They made only a quarter of comments, even though their
>comments got more recommendations from other readers on average. Even when they did speak up, they
>tended to cluster in stereotypically “female” areas: they were most common on articles about parenting, caring
>for the old, fashion and dining. (Women got more recommendations than men on most of the sports blogs, but
>they still made, for example, only 5 percent of comments on the soccer blog.)"

>"It seems unlikely that these effects are confined to The New York Times; studies of online commenting find
>broad signs of inequality. (While women are well-represented on some websites, like the image-sharing site
>Pinterest, these sites do not tend to focus on expressing and defending opinions. Online forums that do often
>have mostly male commenters: examples include Wikipedia edit pages, the social news site Reddit, and the
>question-answering sites Quora and Stack Overflow.) I also spoke to Katherine Coffman, an economist whose
>results echoed mine: she found that women were less willing than men to contribute their ideas in stereotypically
>male areas.

Marie