UPDATE: Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen, who notably estimated that there are more than 10 million users on Google+, points out that the 87 percent male number estimated by Social Statistic is not an accurate representation of the true gender distribution on Google+. He says:
Socialstatistics.com is a cool site where G+ users can submit their profile to see if they make the top 100 leaderboard. Shortly after launching, the 87% male, 11% female, 2% other stat started making the rounds. But that data is completely skewed: males tend to compete for leaderboard recognition more than females.
Another great site, findpeopleonplus.com now indexes nearly 948,000 Google+ user profiles and tracks many data points about the users, including gender. They report that of the first 948,000 profiles they crawled, 74.9% are male and 25.1% are female. But crawling is time consuming and the crawlers were finding the mostly male user profiles from the initial field test seeding. This is not a random sampling.
My surname-based random sampling has shown a very different number. For the first time, I’m publishing it here:
7/4 77% Male, 23% Female
7/7 68.4% Male, 31.6% Female (after the user base had almost doubled)
7/14 66.4% Male, 33.6% Female
In other words, “Google+ is quickly turning pink,” Allen says.
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Google+ may be the hottest thing in social networking right now. Just don’t expect to find many women hanging out there. According to Google+ analytics site Social Statistics, 8.67 out of 10 Google+ users are male. That’s right, almost every single person on the site is a dude, at least according to this count. It’s like the early days of the Internet all over again! In a bad way!
Even the makeup of the site’s top 10 most popular users matches the ratio overall; out of the 10 users with the biggest followings — which includes Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Larry Page and Google+ mastermind Vic Gundotra — only one is a actual real-life woman: famous actress, writer and gamer Felicia Day.
So why, exactly, is Google+ such a sausage fest? Well, we can only guess. One likely factor is that early adopters in the world of tech appear to be mostly male. We have yet found a way to browse the site by profession, but we’d wager that some of the top jobs on Plus include software engineers, programmers, bloggers, website operators and, ahem, tech journalists.
Regardless of the reason for the male-domination, the social network is doing quite well: Google has confirmed our earlier report that there are more than 10 million profiles on the site. This is impressive growth for a social network that is only a little more than two weeks old.
The number was touted by Larry Page during yesterday’s earnings call, during which Page announced that Google made a record-breaking $9.03 billion during the second quarter of 2011. That’s a 32 percent increase since last year. Now, if only they could get the number of women on Plus to increase by the same amount, then we’d be getting somewhere.
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