What happened when we pledged to amplify the voices of women on International Women’s Day
On International Women’s Day, March 8 2017, we made a pledge that we would amplify the voices of women on social media. Only women.
We did so to tip the scales for a change. Seemed like the right thing to do, given how male dominated our tech industry is.
Then we became curious about the gender ratio of our audience on Twitter. How many women did we actually follow? Would it be similar to the tech industry overall? Better? Worse?
Using Twitter Analytics, we quickly looked up the demographics of our followers. To our surprise, we got a perfect score. 50–50!
Next, we decided to look at the demographics of the people we follow. Turns out Twitter’s free analytics dashboard doesn’t do it for you. Fortunately, we discovered Proporti.onl from this helpful article. And, as the web site says, “It’s inaccurate and it undercounts nonbinary folk, but it’s better than making no effort at all” to understand your gender ratio of your Twitter audience.
Interestingly, they gave us a different score for our followers (55% men and 43% women) than Twitter Analytics (50% , 50%). But what we were more interested in was the ratio of people we follow, which came back as 54% men, 45% women.
Over here at The Male Allies Project, we want to follow a diverse group of people, and paying attention to gender is an important first step. While our score is a whole lot better than many male leaders in tech, we can still do better.
How about you?
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