Thursday, August 26, 2010

Guys and girls, part 1 (of many)

All posts relating to the book blogger survey can be found under this tag. A compiled list of results can be found here.

As some readers may remember, the very original question standing behind the book blogger survey was the question of "Male vs. Female", a question seemingly answered by the survey: the dry results found that 83% of respondents were female, and 17% were male. As I mentioned in that post, the numbers vaguely resembled (without matching) my estimations (60% female and 20% male, with the remaining 20% set aside for shared blogs and authors of unknown gender. The immediate question following the simple answer was, however, how does everything break down? Are some bloggers more prone to certain things than others? Are misconceptions (for instance, I have long held the idea that women book bloggers are more community oriented) simply grounded in stereotypes ? Time to find out. (note: some images may be small or unclear. Click on images to enlarge.)

Age:

Compared here are the age breakdowns by gender. The first noticeable distinction is the lack of significantly young men - 18 to 24 year olds account for 10% of respondents, while the majority find themselves in middle age, totaling to 54% between the ages of 30 and 49. Women, on the other hand, are a little more... predictable. The graph shows a simple bell curve, where the largest age group is 30-39 with 35% of respondents. Meanwhile, 16% of respondents are under 25. When looking at the percentages, one must keep in mind that the overall number of male respondents was significantly lower than that of female, and therefore all statistics should be taken with a grain of salt. It's hard to calculate accurate statistics with only 50 respondents that fall into this category, but we shall try anyways.

Literary background:
An interesting thing about men that has little to do with this particular subject - male respondents seemed to offer fewer decline to state answers. Of course this could be due to the fact that far fewer men responded. Carrying on... literary backgrounds. The statistics here are quite interesting, actually. Women follow the general trend fairly reliably - 40% with "literary" degrees, 40% having taken college courses, and 17% having only the basics. With men, meanwhile, just under half took college courses, while again 40% have "literary" degrees. Only 12% come with the minimum.

Memes:
Rather different results. 56% of men never participate in memes, while only 18% of women never do memes. For women, the numbers are fairly evenly spaced with 30% doing 1-2 memes a week, 19% 1-2 a month, and 25% 1-2 a year. 5% participate in memes 3-7 times a week, as opposed to 0 male respondents. These numbers indicate rather clearly that memes are far more common among women book bloggers than men, though men are not entirely averse to it. Still, an interesting distinction.

Book tours:
Interesting to note: these graphs, when looked at in bar graph form, look very similar. 55% of female book bloggers participate in no book tours, as opposed to 88% of men. 4% of men for each of the other options - in this case, 1 respondent for each case. Women, meanwhile, are slightly more varied - 11% participate in 4 or more, 17% in 2-3, and 16% in 1 book tour. Taking into account the significantly smaller number of male respondents, though, the two graphs appear to be quite similar. A clear majority don't participate in book tours while the remaining split up fairly well regarding how many tours they do.

Due to the lengths of these posts, the remaining statistics will be published in further installments. I would also like to apologize for the delay in getting these statistics out - there were numerous glitches and delays in both the analysis process and the process of actually getting these graphs into a readable format. Most of the information is now ready and results should come out at a much quicker rate. Thank you for your patience!

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