Chicks rule?

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

Back in 2010 we calculated there were 74 million more women on social networks than men. We’ve had a fresh look at the data. In the age of Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram, do chicks still rule?

» See the new diagram
» See the old diagram

Credits —

DESIGN: David McCandless
RESEARCH: Dan Hampson
ADDITIONAL DESIGN: Piero Zagami, Tatjana Dubovina
SOURCE: Google Ad Planner
DATA: BIT.LY/CHICKSRULE

Chaz

I didn’t know it was a competition.
- Luca
  
  Me too!
http://lisatheknitter.wordpress.com Lisa

Let’s all time travel back to 1992 when calling women “chicks” was still cool.
- http://clubneko.net nick
  
  Fast-forward to 2012 when shaming folk for their language is all the rage.
Tait B

I guess imgur is tied to reddit? I would suspect a mostly male population, but I don’t have the data.
EB

this diagram is really bad.
looking at it i would say that there is around an equal total visits of female and male (as there are some places men are majority and some that women are).
However, the bottom line is that there are 99 MILLION more women visits in social networks. this is around 5% more for the women side in total.

I think that sorting via percentage is not a good idea here and that having the figures change size according to amount of visits would have been a better idea.
- Spencer
  
  I agree. The diagrams do little to help my understanding of what has changed. Maybe a swingometer or similar would be clearer.
NA

How many men vs women are on dating site?
Tom

This is about as bad a chart as any I’ve seen. It took me way too long to figure each column and what the relationships were in the data, and I’m still not sure of top (gray) section or the last two columns; presumably the last two columns are some measure of the number of users or popularity.

What’s wrong:
You change the means of measuring the split of male/female users at least once. The high-female section appears to be (females – males) / (females + males) while the high-male section is probably (males – females)) / (females + males). Which calculation is used for the “equality” sites is impossible to discover.
The percent for each site is printed, making the bar graphs redundant.
The bar graphs have no units associated with them, making interpretation difficult. It requires a bit of work to discover that the number of people printed in each bar is the printed percent minus fifty.
There’s no explanation at all for the right-most columns; a simple title label would have made this much easier to understand.
- Joel
  
  Agree. I think a data visualization should convey the big message at first glance, not after careful reading of a bunch of numbers. Also, any bar graph where 56% looks double the size of 53% (i.e. 50% is the zero point) seems like a bad idea. At least I got the pink vs. blue distinction right off the bat!
http://twitter.com/encratica encratica

Female = pink, male = blue? ‘Chicks’? I thought you were better than that.
http://www.datadesigngroup.com Data Design Group

this is awesome, keep the informative posts coming!
http://www.spokanehomebuilders.org Builders in Spokane

Well, I think women are more “cheesy” than men. They really are up to the smallest details. Can’t blame them though..
Alex

Just want to point out that the subtitle ‘gender balance on social networking sites’ betrays a pretty shallow use of the term ‘gender’ as male/female.
http://energetycznie.com.pl Energia

Omg what is happening with this world ;)? Where are the good old housewives?
Zorro

The new diagram is an Error 404… :(
- Dan, Editor
  
  Hi Nicolas, it’s working ok for us, what browser are you viewing on?
Anne Marie

Hey, the link for the new diagram doesn’t work.
- Dan, Editor
  
  Hi Anne Marie, which browser are you using to view the site? The link seems to be working ok for us.
  
  Thanks,
  
  Dan

Chicks rule?

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