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daenerys comments on LW Women Entries- LW Meetups - Less Wrong Discussion

8 [deleted] 20 April 2013 04:52PM

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Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2013 05:20:25PM *  0 points [-]

REPOST- I messed up the first poll, so I retracted and reposted a fixed version. Gosh, you guys are fast at responding! If you voted in the minute or two that the first poll was up, please revote in this poll.

This topic (LW meetups) is the one that I personally am most interested in. I'm curious if the gender representation in meetups is better/same/worse than it is on the LW website. I hypothesize that it is slightly better.

Gathering data Please vote below iff you are a meetup regular!

I regularly attend LW meetups, and the gender balance, (in percentage of women participants) at the meetup I attend is:

*Note- I'm near positive that in the fiasco that was Me Trying to Create a Poll that I voted twice for the 33% option (long story), so you should probably subtract 1 from that bin.

Yes, I recognize the flaws in this poll. A big flaw is that one meetup might have 10 people answer the poll, and another meetup might only have one or none. If you are willing, please leave a comment with your meetup location, and gender ratio.

Submitting...

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2013 06:00:50PM 5 points [-]

Vancouver.

We have no female regulars at this time. We've had 2 female regulars in the past, but we have high turnover for some reason (my fault, just can't figure out how). Unsure how many regulars we even have right now, but have had probably 10 or 15 unique regulars.

Comment author: [deleted] 20 April 2013 05:50:47PM 4 points [-]

Columbus, OH- 33%

Columbus is run by a woman (me), and we started off with an even 50/50 split, approximately. It wasn't until we started growing that the gender ratio got more skewed, and now we are down to only 33% female. Current size (growing): We have about a dozen regulars, a handful of occasionals, and about half-dozen new people that I expect to hang around.

Random notes/thoughts:

1) We (were) mostly poly, and we did a lot of growing by inviting people we were dating, or chatting with on okc, or whatnot....Or rather, the women did that (thus bringing in a bunch of new men, some of which were good participants, and some of which come/came regularly but as a "boyfriend" and did not participate much), but the men did NOT do that (even though they were occasionally dating women which would be great fits for the group).

2) We then went on to join a humanist organization which recruited in another group of mainly-men.

3) If I made of list of all the members and crossed off the ones who contribute/participate the least (or do so in a negative/disruptive way), I could cross off half the members, and none of them would be women. In other words, the women that we DO have, are consistently high-level participants. The men are more likely to be non-participative (especially the "boyfriends"), or disruptive. (of course, we have lots of really awesome men too. The point is that we have no un-awesome women).

Comment author: maia 21 April 2013 04:16:26AM 1 point [-]

Washington, DC.

We only have two female regulars that I can think of (including me). But our core group is also pretty small (~7 people), so the percentage ends up being moderately high. We also have maybe a dozen semi-regulars, who are all male.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 20 April 2013 05:52:55PM 1 point [-]

I've been to a couple or three meetups, and if I remember correctly, they were majority male, but I wasn't the only female. These were small groups-- maybe half a dozen people.

Comment author: [deleted] 26 April 2013 01:51:11PM 0 points [-]

(I had to see the raw poll data because I was incredulous that all the figures would be multiples of 5 by sheer coincidence, so I suspected there was a glitch or something.)

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 20 April 2013 09:56:57PM 0 points [-]

No female participation in Phoenix yet (that I know of).