RE: Is There Really an Advantage to Being a Woman on Steemit?
I think your point down in the comment section about "The more male-dominated a scene is, the more that any woman that is seen stands out" is pretty great. I hadn't thought of it in that sense before, but it does check out.
Regarding the data, a couple of things I'll point out:
First, in terms of followers, women are massively underrepresented, assuming that we look only at the "gendered" pool, they're 11.4-13.8%.
But in terms of posting rewards, looking just at the gendered group it's 22.8%, which is a good deal above the 16.67% of 1-to-5 ratio (Assuming it's 1-to-5 and not 1-in-5, in which case it's 20%, and only slightly over-represented).
The other point is about the witnesses. It's important to note the key word there is "confirmed." We don't know the gender of many witnesses. Especially outside of the top 50 or so (and most interfaces actively don't show you anyone but the top 50, including Steemit's own dedicated page for it), and out of those top 50, quite a few are collectives or companies, rather than "people" (such as Curie, Utopian-io, and quite a few others).
There's still a massive disparity, but the presentation of the edit is more than a bit misleading. The two mentioned female witnesses are very high profile, and no, not just because of the thing I noted at the outset of this comment - Patrice's influence on Steemit, and Crimsonclad's on basically all Discord servers related to Steemit is huge.
Also, I don't hold much weight by "witnesses" - the top 20 get to make decisions on changes to the platform. The people at the bottom are just people who run servers (and basically anyone can do it) and who have no real impact on the platform. You'll see plenty of people march around them being witnesses without it doing anything, and without them having any real understanding of the platform either :-/
@paulag does data analysis of Steemit under the utopian-io initiative. Might be worth hitting her up to see if she could and is interested in having a deeper look at the topic (assuming she hadn't and I just didn't see it, which is quite possible). Edit: I see she replied to the top comment, my bad. I blame lack of sleep and antibiotics.
Thank you so much for this! There's a lot of great information to dig into--this was exactly what I was hoping for in terms of collaboration. :)
I didn't do the research myself on the two confirmed witnesses, so I can't guarantee the methodology, but I asked the woman who did and she said she personally went through and looked through profiles to check for any indications of gender. Even though we don't know the genders for sure in many cases (a problem I came up against when I took my cursory look at the two metrics I mentioned), it's statistically pretty unlikely that the unknowns could include enough women enough that they'd hit the 16.67% mark.
I think the bottom line is that since we're dealing with a platform that is completely governed by its users, even if women and other minority groups were to become disproportionately represented in the higher ranks, there would still never be equality of power unless we got our number of users to be a little more even. But of course that's an entirely different question than whether or not being female gives you an advantage.
Yeah, I actually read that piece when it was first written, but only glanced at it again when I posted the above comment, as it was already after 2 AM...
As for your final point, the way Steemit works actually means that isn't true, because on Steemit, your SP is your power, and if the only women on Steemit were the top 100 SP-holders, then the platform would be decided by women, even though in absolute numbers their percentage would be tiny.
The top 40 users on the platform hold over 90% of the power on the platform...
But yes, such an environment does not lend itself to more women coming, which in turn doesn't lend itself to more women coming. Though I can say that of all the big internet communities I've been on, Steemit has a much higher representation of women, even if not in the higher echelons. Though it could be just the circles on Steemit I'm hanging around in.