Men outnumber women in the tech industry. This isn’t particularly newsworthy, although it continues to be quite disheartening.
Figures released today from web monitoring company Royal Pingdom highlight another repercussion of the skewed gender representation in tech – namely, the overwhelming predominance of male visitors to technology blogs.
Royal Pingdom looked a number of popular tech blogs, including ReadWriteWeb, and examined the ratio of male to female site visitors by using demographics data from Google’s DoubleClick Ad Planner.
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Of the popular blogs that Royal Pingdom examined, only Mashable comes anywhere close to a 50-50 split between male and female visitors. Sites like Techmeme and Slashdot have closer to 90% male visitors. About 72% of ReadWriteWeb’s visitors, according to Royal Pingdom’s stats, are male.
In a survey from last summer, comScore found that women outnumber men on social networking sites and tend to spend more time on those sites as well. But that interest and engagement hasn’t seemed to spill over into the tech blogosphere.
What contributes to the difference? Is it a reflection of the tech industry at large? Is it the content on the sites? The authors’ gender? The editorial voice or tone? Is it the community that surrounds it?
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