Demographics: According to Google Analytics, 41% of Forum viewers are female (higher than the proportion of community members who are female), but we believe* that males make up a higher proportion of authors than their proportion in the community...
*Many authors are anonymous, so we aren’t certain of this.
For what it’s worth EA Survey 2019 data suggests this too. Obviously classifying Forum posts directly gives a more comprehensive sample, but as you note has the issue of authors being of indeterminate gender. The chi square tests are, however, not significant for posting on the EA Forum (p=0.052) and writing about EA (not on the EA Forum) (p=0.057), while the others were p<0.001.
Thanks for sharing this! I found it somewhat surprising that the scale of effect looks like it’s bigger for comments vs. posts. (I imagine that the difference in significance is also partly that the sample size for posters is much smaller, so it’s harder to reach a significance threshhold.)
For what it’s worth EA Survey 2019 data suggests this too. Obviously classifying Forum posts directly gives a more comprehensive sample, but as you note has the issue of authors being of indeterminate gender. The chi square tests are, however, not significant for posting on the EA Forum (p=0.052) and writing about EA (not on the EA Forum) (p=0.057), while the others were p<0.001.
Thanks for sharing this! I found it somewhat surprising that the scale of effect looks like it’s bigger for comments vs. posts. (I imagine that the difference in significance is also partly that the sample size for posters is much smaller, so it’s harder to reach a significance threshhold.)