A typical female GNXP reader?
We've moved north of 400 responses
on the reader survey. I think the goal of an N of 500 is totally viable. In the past I've actually pushed it well north of 600 by leaving the survey open for a while. I know there are some people who drop in once a week or so, or don't have time or inclination to participate initially. If you want to participate:
It will take ~10 minutes, and no answer is mandatory. There are already a few robust findings though. GNXP readers are well educated and smart. About 60-70 percent aver that they are irreligious, and 85 percent reject the existence of the supernatural. Over half have backgrounds in the natural sciences. None of this is too surprising. I've been taking surveys of the readership since 2004, and the main change has been in politics. Whereas in the mid-2000s libertarians were the largest contingent, now Left-liberals are, though there remains a sizable libertarian minority. One of the most consistent findings on this weblog has been the sex ratio: the proportion of female core readership is on the order of ~15%. Since moving to Discover it looks like that ~20% is the new set point. This shouldn't be too surprising...there are very few explicitly female handles in the comments. Though because of the male bias in the readership there's obviously going to be a natural tendency toward assigning implicit male identity to anonymous or gender ambiguous commenters when a substantial number will be female. Currently the most prominent female in the comments is Michelle
, who is a prominent science blogger
in her own right (pictured above). The very fact that I could type the previous sentence is a commentary on the sex ratio imbalance! A major reason I want to go north of 500 responses is that I can compare across two classes more easily. The smaller a sample size the greater the error. I'd be a lot more confident comparing those who believe in God vs. those who don't if I had more respondents who actually believed. But now that I'm at nearly 100 female respondents I thought it would be interesting to compare across the two sexes in terms of similarities and differences. First, let's compare the cross-tabs of sex by other variables in a table. You see below the percentage of males and females who fall into a particular class. So below you can see that 73 percent of males support abortion on demand vs. 82 percent of females. While 36 percent of male respondents have made a non-trivial edit to Wikipedia, only 12 percent of female respondents have.
VariableMaleFemale
Upper class41
Upper middle class3631
Middle Class4657
Lower middle class1216
Lower class20
Less than secondary school10
Secondary school20
Some university without completion or higher education less than bachelors degree1719
Bachelors degree2734
Masters degree (or equivalent)2530
Advanced degree (professional degree or doctorate)2817
Yes to abortion on demand7382
Accepts the existence of supernatural1319
ESTJ - Overseer23
ESFJ - Supporter11
ISTJ - Examiner1010
ISFJ - Defender01
ESTP - Persuader11
ESFP - Entertainer11
ISTP - Craftsman39
ISFP - Artist24
ENTJ - Chief40
ENTP - Originator101
INTJ - Strategist2928
INTP - Engineer2415
ENFJ - Mentor30
ENFP - Advocate21
INFJ - Confidant213
INFP - Dreamer77
Yes, has done recreational genomics2824
Conversant in programming language5635
Interested in transhumanism5036
Knows what narrow-sense heritability is3827
Have to be on guard against genetic determinism67
Genetic determinism is a concern, but often overblown5067
Genetic determinism is not a concern4426
Biologically derived behavioral differences between the sexes trivial314
Biologically derived behavioral differences between the sexes very modest1324
Biologically derived behavioral differences between the sexes somewhat significant5251
Biologically derived behavioral differences between the sexes very significant3311
Has made non-trivial edit to Wikipedia3612
Next I looked at the open ended questions. What's the difference in sexual partners? I'm not going to give you a chart here because what you see isn't too unexpected. Most people have less than 20 sexual partners, but a few people claim hundreds and even thousands of partners.
# of sex partners
MedianMeanStandard Deviation
Male415.568
Female411.826
Limited to < 50 sex partners
Male367.8
Female47.449.7
The median and mean are different because the mean is much more sensitive to outliers than the median. You see that there are some really promiscuous males who are driving the average up. So I decided to limit the sample to a more realistic range (for mortals). Interestingly you now see that female readers have somewhat more sexual partners than males! There are some obvious interpretations of what's going on here, but I'll leave it to you guys. Now let's look at the political orientations. Specifically, political liberalism and economic liberalism (Left-liberalism, I confirmed that most readers understood my attempt with cross-tabs on taxes). In the charts below blue = male and red = female.
The differences are small. I'd expected a bigger difference on economic issues, but though males are more conservative, not especially so. I wanted to look at scatter plots, but the problem here is that there are only 10 discrete values on each dimension, so there's going to be a lot of overlap. So below you see plots where positions on the coordinate map are shaded in relation to how many individuals match that social and economic liberalism combination.
Just so you know, some people left their sex undefined, so that's why you see a match at 10 for economic liberalism and 0 for social liberalism on the non-sex differentiated plot, but not on the male and female ones. The readers of this weblog tend toward Left-liberalism, but not overwhelmingly so, with a large libertarian minority, and a non-trivial conservative one. Next let's look at how many years individuals have been reading Gene Expression. Here at the summary statistics:
Years read
MedianMeanStandard Deviation
Male33.22.4
Female12.41.8
Males have been reading much longer. I've long noticed greater "churn" among the female readership. The proportion of females is the same, but they tend to always report reading for not as long. This can be explained by women coming and going more often. Here's the density distribution with two curves, one for males and one for females:
Finally, is there a difference in self-reported IQs by sex? Not much:
