Gender domination online

It's been said several times in lectures, supported by statistics, that the majority of gamers are male. Yet, according to this, the gender distribution of the American internet population is firmly skewed towards females. More women are currently online than men, and future projections show that the gap will only widen, and women will outnumber men online by over 8 million in 2012.

So, where are all these women?

Apparently, they are the driving force behind the success of blogs, journals, and other such social networks found online. OpenSocial and Facebook Stats from Rapleaf, posted in 2007, revealed that Facebook and MySpace users were 63% female, and other social networking sites such as Friendster and Plaxo were also significantly dominated by female users rather than male users. Livejournal is also female dominated, where 66.4% of users are female.

I've experienced the last first hand, as LJ is my virtual community of choice. I've had my LJ account for over five years now, and have several friends that I've never met physically, but trust and confide in as much as I do my friends who live near me. I'm a member of several communities, where I've seen the gender domination in action. The default assumption by many in these comms seems to be that all the users are female, except the ones who clearly state their male gender through their username by attaching "-boy" (or "-man" or "-guy") to the end.

Over the years, there have been several instances where users in a comm have, in the midst of a discussion or a debate, had to say specifically, "Um...I'm a guy." Almost inevitably, the response is something along the lines of, "Wha? You're a GUY?" And then another user will add, "I'm a guy, too." Then a few more will chime in with the admission that, yes, they too are males, to which they get something like this in reply: "I didn't know we had guys in here. Hey, guys!" Males on LJ are like the bunnies and squirrels on campus: they're there, and we know they're there, probably in more numbers than we suspect - but we don't register their existence until they come into our line of sight so we can marvel at their presence. (Or, you know, we run them over with our cars...but that was only the once and I felt horrible about it.)

So, yes, while guys may dominate virtual games like WoW and Ultima, us girls are out there, too, only in different places. Just something I thought I should throw out there. :)