Is Google+ Becoming More Female?

by Christina Warren

If you believe the “unofficial statistician” for Google+, the new social network isn’t nearly as male-dominated as previously reported.

Paul Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com and the man who released a report estimating that Google+ was about to reach 10 million users, says that the male-to-female ratio on Google+ is not as disparate as some reports, including those published by Mashable, have seemed. Instead, Allen’s latest figures show that 33% of Google+ users, as of July 14, 2011 are female.

To be clear, this still means that Google+ is still a male-dominated network (at least for now), but the breakdown isn’t as extreme as the 90% male, 10% female stat from SocialStatistics or the 75% male, 25% female stats from FindPeopleonPlus.

Allen’s methodology in estimating Google+ statistics varies from some other Google+ data sources.

This is how Mashable’s Stan Schroeder described the methodology earlier this week,

He sampled a number of surnames from the U.S. Census Bureau data and compared it to surnames of Google+ users. By comparing surname popularity in the U.S. with the number of users on Google+ with each surname, he can guesstimate the percentage of the U.S. population that signed up for Google+. Finally, he calculated a ratio of U.S. to non-U.S. users to generate an estimate for the number of Google+ users worldwide.

We’re not sure how census data can be applied to gender, especially on a social network, but we’ve reached out to Allen for additional information on how his data was composited.

Still, Allen’s figures show that from July 4, 2011 through July 14, 2011, the male/female gap closed considerably. On July 4, 2011, Allen estimated that 23% of users were female. By July 14, 2011, that percentage was up to 33.6%.

In its own videos and marketing for the service, Google put a lot of emphasis on women, which to us, implies that women are a prime target for Google+.

In our own unscientific estimates, we’ve seen more women joining Google+ over the last few days than when the service first launched.

That leads us to our question — do you see more women joining Google+ in your own circles? What do you think it will take for the gender ratio to start to balance out? Let us know in the comments.

Google+ Users Are Nearly All Male

Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Google+ stats trackers: Three quarters (or more) of Google+ users are male.

SocialStatistics, a third-party site that gathers data from select profiles, pegs the percentage of male users at 86.8%, whileFindPeopleOnPlus, which curates information from about a million users, says men constitute 73.7% of Google+.

FindPeopleOnPlus also discovered that 95% of the Google+ users who say they are “looking for love” on the site are male. Some 25,000 users in their sample identify themselves as single, versus 19,000 married and 12,000 in a relationship. The vast majority of the million users sampled don’t say what they are.

With around 60% of users identifying themselves as web developers or software engineers, that paints a fairly stereotypical picture of Google+’s userbase: nerdy guys who have deep understandings of technology and who don’t mind killing some time setting up Circles of friends.

It’s true that the early adopters of any new technology are usually male. But Google+ will have to appeal to a mainstream audience if it’s to reach mass adoption anytime soon. Consider the gender breakdown for Google+’s biggest competitor, Facebook. The social network is close to a 50-50 split between men and women. And some of Facebook’s most addicted, most enthusiastic users are women.

Meanwhile, Google is about to stop requiring users to input their gender — meaning we may get less accurate stats as time progresses.