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