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MBlume comments on Of Gender and Rationality - Less Wrong
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I've noticed strong female representation (where I least expected to find it) in The Skeptic Zone,an Australian skeptics group. The feeling I get of that community (even just as a podcast lurker) is that it's much more lighthearted than LW/OB. Whether that makes any difference to sex ratios, I don't know.
For most of the time I've listened to the podcast, there's been regular strong contributions from females. My gut feel would have been that having good female role models would encourage more female participation, however I just did a quick eyeballing of the Skeptic Zone's FaceBook fans and it looks typically about 5:1 biased to males.
Skepchick is also notable, I think.
Hmm... sometimes a "girls division" of a group can be a net plus. "linuxchix", "geekgirls" and "devchix" are also strong, enjoyable groups that tend to hang off the larger mainly-male groups, to the benefit of all.
Of course, the opposite is also sometimes true... but would it hurt to start up, say, "LW girls" or similar?
Anecdote: the annual linux.conf.au that was held in Sydney a couple of years back had the highest female:male ratio of any linuxconf.au so far (1 in 10), and that was due to the extremely strong support from the local linuxchix chapter. It took a local hero (Pia Waugh) and friends to make it happen... but it did help