site-wide male vs. female

I think it's kind of interesting that whenever I've checked my "Male or female?" page over the years, it's been scarily consistent, always right around 75% male to 25% female. And I've always kind of wondered how that compares to the rest of the site.

But I don't see a place in stats/memes or the Zeitgeist where the site-wide ratio exists. Am I just not looking in the right place? I tried looking in CK logs to get the total female and the total male counts, but while the former shows me 141894 results, the latter page appears to just crap out. Too much testosterone, I suppose?

My statistics are 56.9% male to 43.1% female. That is about normal for me.

Actually, the male is about half. The percent ignores all the na, other, and not set.

ercent male: 72.86% : Percent female: 27.14%

OK I'll edit that. Better?

My statistics run about 33% male, 66% female.

I've always disliked this particular stat. If I have 20 books by one female author, that counts the same as having one book by one male author. It's not indicative of much.

>7 norabelle414: The stat is looking only at total authors in your collections, not total books by authors. I have 574 authors out of 1,952 titles. My stats are 40/60 male to female roughly.

ETA: Maybe that's the point you are making? You'd rather see total books by female vs. total books by male?

> 6/7: That would be a good point.

Many of mine seem to have been unstuck - again - for some reason, so I'll report back once I fixed that.

P.s.: But I agree: having that site wide (both options) would be fascinating.

ETA: Especially if we could filter that by century of original publication. For example: were female authors really more rare in the 15th century than in the 19th century? Fascinating! But I guess I'm dreaming now. Probably too complex.

Have to admit that I had never looked at this stat before, just did, my authors are pretty much 50-50.

>10 CarolO: Same here. But it's the family library so it's both His and Hers.

I'm about 50-50. Haven't looked at those stats in ages! And I agree, it would be nice to also see how many books you have by male/female authors.

I'm at 70% male authors, 30% female. That's about how my reading usually goes all the time with occasional fluctuations in both directions.

I've read 64% percent male and 36% percent female. This saddens me because it's clear evidence I'm neglecting female authors. I must actively seek out more.

I would love to know what the site wide average is.

There goes all my free time until I clean up my authors.

Thanks guys!

On a related note, 54% of my books are by the living and 72% percent of members read more books by living authors. I expect members who read a lot of books by the dead have relatively more male authors.

~20% of my books were translations. I would expect people who read a lot of translations to have more books by dead authors and less books by women.

I'm at 74.6% male and 25.4% female. That is up from last year's 23% (at 0.03% per new author) as a result of an effort to read more diversely.

And yes, some site-wide comparison (just like the one provided with the dead/alive stat) would be useful.

Mine is a bit skewed by the fact that I have large numbers of science/engineering books and also a substantial collection of novels by gay male writers: a disappointing 20% female. If you took number of books rather than number of authors it might look a bit more balanced, because I'm more likely to have multiple books by the same author in fiction than in non-fiction.

I wonder if there is a correlation with dead/alive. I have 44.6% alive, which is probably also rather low.

>16 Settings:
I don't read many translations, but I do read quite a lot of books in other languages.

I'm at 82.43% male and 17.57% female. I'm into several male dominated hobbies and fields; I think my fiction would skew much closer to average.

Percent male: 47.73% : Percent female: 52.27%

I love that page; it's one of my favorites. I see that I have Percent male: 72.22% : Percent female: 27.78% and I have Dead: 86 / Alive: 77 / Unknown: 35 / Not a Person: 5 (Percent alive: 47.24%). Of that group in the Unknown category, I'm very sure of at least 2 of them as having died quite some time ago (since the books they wrote were published more than 100 years ago).

The surmise about dead authors being more likely to be male is a good one, but another issue also affects this. Female authors, when listed as joint authors, are more likely to be listed second (at least in the books I own). Will and Ariel Durant are a good example. He's in the dead column, and the male column, and she's not in the female column, nor the dead column.

Many of the books I've entered are science fiction, or technical books, and the latter tend to have multiple authors (more often male).

I have 54.02% male and 43.36% female (plus 0.45% n/a and 2.17% not set). That seems about right; I would have guessed a 55-45 split in favor of males, ignoring any n/a, not set, etc. I don't really pay much attention to this statistic, as I don't really care about the gender of the authors I read.

I have 80.63% male and 19.37% female, which surprised me as for the first couple of months of cataloguing it was about a 50-50 split. I think that means that, regardless of percentages, I have a lot more favourite female authors. I'd be interested to see a per book sex split rather than per author, as I have multiple books by most of those 19.37% female authors, whereas a lot of the men are one-offs.

39.2% alive, for the record.

Are women more likely to read books by female authors and men to read more male authors? Probably. So I wonder what the gender split is for LT members.

My gut feeling is that women read recreationally more than men. Certainly reading groups around here* seem to have a female bias - the nearest actually excludes men. How's that for political correctness!

*Edited to clarify - 'here' means where I live, not LibraryThing.

>14 Settings: "I would love to know what the site wide average is."

Well we're sampling the site, and after a suitable number of responses we'll be able to estimate the population, based on this data. .. if anyone cares to run the stats, assuming that talk responders to this thread are a reasonable approximation to the LT population as a whole, which may well not be true.

My data: Percent male: 66.72% : Percent female: 33.28%

FWIW, I took the average of the % female for 19 people who've posted on this thread and got 36%; I did the same thing with 19 random users (all having more than 100 books) and also got 36%. Probably coincidence that I got the exact same number, but it suggests that the site average per member is going to be somewhere in the range of 30-40%.

From the random users I checked, the lowest %female was 0.82, and the highest was 79.29, so there's quite a spread.

The global site average could be quite different, of course, for all sorts of reasons: for instance, the seven most numerous books on LT are all by the same female author, and if she only gets counted once, that might well bring the average down.

>24 abbottthomas: "Are women more likely to read books by female authors and men to read more male authors? Probably. "

My answer to this is a ressounding NO.
My collections are at 57% male, 43% female, quite even.

Doing the random user thing again, before running out of lunchbreak I found 18 profile pages that suggested that the user wanted to be identified as female, with an average of 45% female authors, as against 14 profile pages of people who seem to want to be identified as male, with an average of 17% female authors. I ignored those profiles (probably the majority) where users don't advertise their gender in any obvious way.

This sort-of confirms abbotthomas's hypothesis, except that it's quite possible that the people who have "gendered" profile pages aren't representative of users as a whole.

My stats: Percent male: 48.9% : Percent female: 51.1%
I also have 56 not set, a number of whom are trans* or who use gender-neutral pronouns.
Considering my library, I know I read more female authors growing up than male, and that has evened out in adulthood. I was actually surprised at how balanced my library is; I expected it to be closer to the norm, a 30/70-40/60 split. I imagine the number of non-fiction gender and sexuality books I own by female authors helped shift the balance.

>25 reading_fox: I'm thinking that the responders to this thread, and people who check the male vs. female stats generally, are not likely to be representative of LT as a whole, and still less so of the reading population generally.

Oddly, my library skews well to the male - about 90%. I would have to do a little more analysis to confirm this, but I suspect this reflects the sorts of books that dominate my library - math and technology/computing, and old-school science fiction.

Sadly, it's 80-20 M-F for me. Goes against how I think of myself as a reader, but there you are.

>30 kiparsky: An excellent point; seems like most people here (thread) who have a far greater m:f ratio are surprised by it than I think would be the case elsewhere/in general. A lot of people likely don't even think about it.

>30 kiparsky:
I don't know how random the "random user" function really is, but if the small sample I looked at is representative, there isn't a big divergence between people who post here and random users.

I think there is a bit of a pattern to be seen, especially if you look at users with fairly large libraries. Very crudely, those with around 50-75% female tend to have collections weighted towards recent general fiction, those with around 35% female have more mixed fiction/non-fiction collections, around 20% female tends to indicate a mixed collection with a big chunk of something male-dominated (technical/hobby/dead people/sci-fi), and the real outliers (less than 15% male or 15% female) are genre-fiction specialists.

I suspect that the only reason we have as many as 37% female authors is because there is a large collection of romance novels buried in our library of science, history, older SF, etc.

Mine: Percent male: 88.46% : Percent female: 11.54%
Kids: Percent male: 53.03% : Percent female: 46.97%
Wife's: Percent male: 47.37% : Percent female: 52.63%

Both those last 2 I need to fix the author's genders for, 25% of which are not (yet) set. Another project..

Percent male: 85.2% : Percent female: 14.8%

Again this isn't really representative of my reading habits of late.

But with main interests of SF, computer science and RPGs this kind of result was a foregone conclusion.

I'm surprised to be so atypical, but since a lot of my books are children's and YA, I suppose it makes sense.

Mine is, rounded, 82% male, 18% female.

To some extent I think this is caused by my pct of Alive vs. Dead. That meme tells me I have only 43% Living authors, which is lower than 85% of LT users.

Is there a further site-wide breakdown available that would show the relative M-F pcts of Living authors? I'll bet there's a much higher F pct among the Livings than the Deads.

This isn't directly related to the topic of this thread, but I was poking around to get an idea of the male/female ratio of my dead authors and this lady, http://www.librarything.com/author/adamskathleen-1, is listed as dead but she has no death date, only a birth date of 1951 which would make her only 63. Certainly not old enough to presume that she died.

Is this a bug? It certainly throws into doubt the accuracy of the dead/alive numbers.

I certainly think it would be a bug if we're listing live authors under the "deceased" column without reasonable basis. However, when I look at your stats/memes I see Kathleen Adams listed among the living - first name under "Alive", in fact. Is this because you made a change?

Odd thing, that. I see here an entry that purports to lead to her blog, which only gets a 404. I also see a phone number on that page. You could call them to ask...

http://journaltherapy.com/journaltherapy/kathleen-adams/kays-blog

There's also a phone number here:

http://journaltherapy.com/journaltherapy/workshops-consultation/personal/private...

I don't see a death date on the CK, nor online. Looks like a bug, of sorts. 100% of my authors listed as dead, are indeed dead, though.

Dang it, I see that @kiparsky already answered you.

It looks like I got confused as to what I was looking at. Never mind.

Happens to the best of us!

Mine is 56% male to 44% female, rounded. While I have a fair number of philosophy books listed, I've also been making an effort to read more widely. I hope to have reached at least parity in a few years.

>44 RidgewayGirl: Statistically speaking, that may be parity.

I suspect that if I hauled out those books that are stored, that the ratio of male to female would still be the same, but the number of dead folks would rise. For every Simone De Beauvior, there'd be a John Dos Passos and a Jean Paul Sartre, and I'd have three more dead folks, and still have about the same male to female ratio as now.

My library is about 87% male writers, but I have quite a few that aren't identified. One of those is the author of this work: http://www.librarything.com/work/119443/edit/18650691 Diane Preston. When I click on the author name of this work, I am taken an author page for Diane Preston with one work about Dyes, not the book on the Lusitiana. This is quite odd.

>47 rgurskey: That's because the book is actually by Diana Preston and is on her page.

One of the authors on my Not Set list is Norman Taylor which links to http://www.librarything.com/author/taylornorman which is a disambiguation page. Other authors on that page do go to the correct sub-author page (authorname-1) so why is this one not?

I believe it's because this book http://www.librarything.com/work/190855/book/390741 in my library has its author going to the disambiguation page instead of the actual author page. Why isn't it? Should I take this to Combiners?

>49 jjwilson61:
I have a few similar links to disambiguation pages in my Not Set List . . . I hope we can figure out how to fix these.

My rounded % are: 44% male, 56% female, with almost 200 in the Not Set List . . . some of which I will resolve.

One question, several of my Not Set items are collective entities that actually do have an implied/assumed gender: e.g., Delta Delta Delta National Fraternity (female), and Boston Lesbian Psychologies Collective (female), United States Consitutional Convention (male). Despite these being "gendered" organizations, I've marked them as "n/a" . . . does that seem to be correct? Any objections? Would it be better to leave these blank?

All organization should be n/a. Even if they are organizations composes of only one gender, the organization itself can't possibly be gendered.

> 51
I would say that these ARE gendered organizations, but not for the purposes of LT's author assignments . . . but won't debate that here, given that I agree with the n/a designation within the context of LT :)

Looking through my Not Set list, I count:
26 I'm not sure of
97 Female
71 Male

So fixing those might actually shift my overall % a bit . . . but right now I need to get dinner started, so perhaps another day.

But please don't set them just on the basis of ' that is a fe/male name'.

Just ran across this thread and checked:

Male: 581 : Female: 158 : Other/Contested/Unknown: 0 : N/A: 18 : Not set 225

Percent male: 78.62% : Percent female: 21.38%

As for "Not set", how actually important is it?? It depends on ones priorities and to me is not even in the top ten. It is, however interesting and not particularly trivial..

>49 jjwilson61: jjwilson61
Your ground cover book has Gordon P Dewolf as the primary author which I think accounts for the direction to the disambiguation page.

My current balance is 54.85% male to 45.15% female with 61 not set (and various N/A) although I'm slightly confused by some of the not set links. It would be interesting to see how that balance changed if it were per book, but, as I think along some of the longer 'sets' of books I've got, I'm not actually sure that it would change that much.

With regard to the 'not set' authors, some of them appear to be duplicates of people who were listed correctly also (e.g. John Flanagan, Schim Schimmel and Kathleen Goonan - although under female she's listed as Kathleen Ann Goonan). Similarly Stephen Donaldson in the not set list leads to a disambiguation page for two male authors, but he's also listed as Stephen R. Donaldson under male - when I look at the books in my collection by him, his name is entered the same for each of them, but two lead to the disambiguation page and only one to his own page - yet all three show as being in my collection by the same author when I go to his 'own page'. My not set list also contains things like 'Marks and Spencers' ( that was a cookery book printed by a store in the UK) and 'National Trust'. There are also a couple where authors/narrators or authors/illustrators have led to them ending up there rather than in the correct place - for me it wouldn't change anything as they are also in the correct place due to other titles.

I'm not sure that any of this would really change the balance though - looking down the rest of the not sets to ones I think I remember as being male/female when I read the books or saw photos of the author, I don't think the balance would change vastly either.

Given that I don't make a huge effort to make sure that I'm buying/reading female or male authors, just that I can remember the last time I read one of either (as in not so long ago I can't remember who and what I read), I'm not unhappy with that balance. I had a quick look to see what was reflected in my reading this year and so far I've made it through 28 books by men and 23 books by women and my number of audio books listened to is roughly the same (five more male authors than female) and of male to female narrators (although not all male written books were read by men and vice versa).

As someone who has never really studied statistics, I'm presuming aiming for 'equal' representation rarely results in actual 50% values - so what would be considered an acceptable normal range for that?

My Dead/Alive comparison said that my collection was 70.17% alive with 121 not known and 6 falling into not a person. Interesting :D

>38 Crypto-Willobie: Good point, I think. I have 87% male and 13% female authors, while I have only 31% living author.

90.43% men, 9.57% women, roughly as many NA/unkown as women.

I did not look at the dead or alive thing because I find it in poor taste.

91% male, 9%% female. 57.8% living.

I've noticed that quite a few of the "not set" authors link to author pages with 0 works. It looks as though at least some of these might simply be places where LT imported a malformed author name (e.g. P. G.; New Introduction by D.R. Bensen Wodehouse and the Historian Xenophon) and I corrected it manually - presumably the list of authors the M/F page is generated from is an add-only list. As the not-sets don't affect the percentage, it doesn't really matter, but it makes it a bit harder to find the ones that do still need to be set.

>61 thorold: I find things like that helpful because they show me where I missed fixing a bad author from the source. Although the works are right, your library has http://www.librarything.com/work/274540/book/14784927 and http://www.librarything.com/work/2535603/book/15103548 with those authors.

That list is based on what is in your catalogue, not on the work authors.

>62 MarthaJeanne:
Thanks - now it makes more sense. I'd assumed that I must have corrected them as there was no link from the author page to a work, but obviously I hadn't. I've corrected them now, and they disappeared from my M/F list. I'd better try to track down some of the others, then...

>58 henkl: Thank you, henkl. I was afraid my point was being overlooked as the discussion veered off immediately after my post. The (implied) point being, of course, that the higher the pct of pre-20c (and especially pre-19c) authors in one's library, the smaller will be the proportion of female authors due to historical and social factors. On the other hand a view of Living authors who presumably did not write before, say, 1920 at the earliest will probably show a more even (or at least less-male dominant) split between the genders.

You see, I was a little perplexed by my 82M/18F split, as I don't consider myself super-male (whatever that is) in my interests. I would hope the M/F split of my living authors would show 48.98% male and 51.02% female...

I'm at 42% male and 57% female with 19 "not set" authors. Of those 19 "not set", I know that roughly two thirds of them are female. I'm also at 73% living authors, and since it is also being discussed that people with more dead authors might have more male authors, I also will mention that my dead authors are basically 50/50 male/female.

It would be great if the category that catches transgender authors were a little less weird that Other/Contested/Unknown.

But otherwise the data-nerd in me is loving this!

>64 Crypto-Willobie: I have far less books than you, and am off to calculate the male to female count. I predict that it will still be a two-thirds to one-third split (at best), considering the number of technical books I've listed.

...

Man, if I'd *tried*, I couldn't have come closer. Of those authors who are listed as alive (77), I have 52 male and 25 female, and of those who are listed as unknown (35), I have 21 male and 14 female. Dang. Wish I'd bet money on this. I should point out that I'm pretty sure two of those in the Unknown list that are female are long gone, since their books were published at the turn of the last century (Jane Fales and Addie E. Heron).

I'm betting against your assumption, CW, on the living authors in your collection matching the statistical population distribution at large.

What a fascinating and interesting discussion this has been! Thanks, @omargosh, bringing it up. :-D

I'm at about 70% male/30% female, with 67% living. So even though I have read a good amount of recent-ish literature, I don't read a lot of books by women. Or books by a lot of different women. (In my case, counting per book wouldn't increase my percentage of women, I'm sure.)

My living authors are about 25% female, as against 12% female for both the dead and the unknown. I just did a quick count over 200 names in each list, so I probably missed a few. It looks as though there is a clear difference between the living and the rest, but I'd still be well below the average even if I only had living authors.

>67 Lyndatrue:

Well, I was kidding about expecting my Living authors to approach the ideal (?) 50/50 split. But I do still think my F pct would go up significantly if I could see the Living M/F numbers. From 18% to... 25%? 30%, 45%, 19%? Unfortunate I don't think I'll have the time to manually parse the gender of my 1,921 living authors to find out...

>54 MarthaJeanne:

Which is why I do research before moving a name off the "Not Set" list.

>66 knownever:

The category that catches trans authors isn't necessarily Other/Contested/Unknown. There are trans authors who identify as women (and some as men of course) and they should be in the women section and I can see that that is how it is currently being handled.

O/C/U is of course the category that we have to use for those who identify as genderqueer.

66>

Transgender authors should not, generally speaking, be placed in the "other" category; they should be placed in the proper category for the gender that they identify as. Androgynous people and others who do not identify on the gender binary belong there.

(So Patrick Califa is, as he should be, identified as male. Leslie Feinberg - whose chosen prounoun appears to vary with context - is identified as "other".

Believe me, getting anything other than male/female was a big issue that took over a year from when they introduced the gender field until when they allowed options other than just the two (and once one was picked, you couldn't clear it to "unset").

>73 lorax: since this discussion began I've been wondering about the other catch-all category. Interesting to know it was a such a big issue. Facebook recently implemented 50 gender choices http://www.newstatesman.com/sci-tech/2014/02/facebook-introduces-choice-50-gende...

There's also the case of a trans* author who has published both before and after transitioning/legal name change. J Jack Halberstam, for example, falls under "other" because he published prior to transition. Not a great solution, but neither is separating out his works or disregarding his transition altogether.

On the other hand, James/Jan Morris is listed as female, and I have no problem with that. It seems that different people have dealt with this differently.

75>

Absent specific knowledge of the individual in question, I'd be inclined to classify a trans* author by their preferred gender, even if they'd published prior to transitioning. I do the same thing when talking about my trans* friends' past history, prior to transitioning; I'll say "When J. was a little girl, he...." rather than "When J. was a little girl, she....". Some people may have different preferences, of course, and I do always try to respect people's preferred mode of address.

I do see the closeting aspects that I think you're getting at with "disregarding transition", though, and it's something I struggle with sometimes as well.

Bug with the male results page was fixed. I'm now seeing 340,688 males and 142,529 females (635 more than two days ago ... cool!).

So looks like site-wide it's: 70.5% male to 29.5% female.

(Not sure how much the fact that each language it's set in gets a count affects things.)

#77 Agreed; while I expected him to be listed as male, I wasn't terribly surprised at the categorization, but I would have been if he'd still been listed as female. I know LTers better than that :)

My male/female ratio is 70%/30%. Very similar to the site-wide calculation from >78 omargosh:

My male/ female ratio is 46%/54%. Yay for reading Orange Prize /Baileys Prize for Women Fiction books!

eta: After browsing some more, I realized I had a whole list of authors that were not assigned male/female, or were spelled wrong! I just did a good bit of cleaning up in my library and adding to CK. Plus I found out how to fix spelling mistakes or titles with ': a novel' added for no good reason! A good day for me at LT!

>77 lorax: I do see the closeting aspects that I think you're getting at with "disregarding transition"

I imagine it might be possible to get a decent approximation of trans authors on LT by figuring which ones have, in their CK histories, at various times, have been set as more than one value for the gender field (e.g. Chaz Bono's CK history more or less followed his transition (though I'm not sure why Chastity is set in canonical)). Of course, there would be some false positives. But I don't know a way of accessing/searching for the CK history of more than one author.

Which reminds me of other things I wish we could sometimes do with the CK and other data. There are times where I'd love to things like, say, find books by authors with gender X, of nationality Y, with works tagged Z. Or works in my catalog first published after A, tagged by others as B, by authors of Occupation C. The data exists, but now way yet to put it together.

We could also look more closely at the dead author gender thing. Imagine, say, a search where you can find authors by gender and custom birth/death data ranges. We could graph the increase of females authors over time.

Tim, we need more widgets! :-)

My male/female ratio is now worse than it was, because I fixed a few unassigneds (all male), and demoted a "female" author to "n/a" since it's a pseudonym for a group of authors, some male, some female.

Ah well. I clearly need to buy and read more books, and change my ratio that way. Not exactly a hardship.

Male: 873
Female: 138
Not set: 393 !!!

So if LT uses this information to state:

Percent male: 86.35% : Percent female: 13.65%

I'd certainly expect less decimal digits and at least an estimate of uncertainty!