Google+ attracted a lot more men than women out of the gate—everybody seems to agree about that. The question is, how much of a boy's club is the new social networking service, and is it going to stay more blue than pink?
In a new blog post, Ancestry.com founder and "Google+ unofficial statistician" Paul Allen attempts to debunk what he calls the "totally flawed data" that's being cited in reports from Mashable, Forbes, and others claiming the ratio of males to females on Google+ is as high as 9-to-1.
The trouble, according to Allen, is that people are relying on stats provided by sites like Socialstatistics.com and Findpeopleonplus.com that are based on non-random samplings of Google+ users, like Socialstatistics.com's top 100 leaderboard.
"Socialstatistics.com is a cool site where G+ users can submit their profile to see if they make the top 100 leaderboard," Allen writes. "Shortly after launching, the 87 percent male, 11 percent female, 2 percent 'other' stat started making the rounds. But that data is completely skewed: males tend to compete for leaderboard recognition more than females."
So what's the real ratio of men to women on Google+?
Going by what he calls "surname-based random sampling," Allen claims to have found "a very different number" from the male-centric stats cited elsewhere. As of Thursday, he writes, Google+ was 66.4 percent male and 33.6 percent female, according to his sampling.
What's more, "Google+ is quickly turning pink," he writes. Allen has apparently been conducting his gender breakdowns for a couple of weeks now and published findings that show that the initial male-heavy user base for Google+, which was launched June 28, is rapidly trending towards more equitable gender distribution.
Thus on July 4, Google+ was 77 percent male and 23 percent female, on July 7 it was 68.4 percent male and 31.6 percent female, and as noted, on July 14, it was on the cusp of a 2-to-1 male-to-female ration.