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-t…
"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