Statistician: Women catching up on Google+

Women are fast catching up with men in signing up for Google's upcoming social network Google+, a statistician disclosed over the weekend. Paul Allen, founder of genealogy site Ancestry.com, said women now take up 33 percent of Google+ as of July 14, up from 23 percent on July 4. "Google+ is quickly turning pink," he said in a Google+ post. He also said it is likely Google+'s female population percentage may surpass that of business social network LinkedIn by August. Citing data from Pew, he said LinkedIn, which has some 100 million users, is still 63 percent male and 37 percent female. "Google+ is definitely for men, women, and other. (But not kids....yet)," he said. 'Flawed' data? Allen said his data, based on surnames on Google+, showed 77 percent of members of Google+ were male and 23 percent female on July 4. But when the user base "almost doubled" on July 7, the ratio had changed to 68.4 percent male and 31.6 percent female. On July 14, the males' share went further down to 66.4 percent, while that of females went up to 33.6 percent. Allen described as "a lot of misinformation" earlier reports about Google+'s male to female ratio, saying they were based on "totally flawed data." He said Socialstatistics.com, which was quoted as saying Google+ was 87 percent male and 11 percent female, based its numbers on users submitting their profile to see if they make the top 100 leaderboard. "But that data is completely skewed: males tend to compete for leaderboard recognition more than females," he said. Allen said another site, findpeopleonplus.com, indexed nearly 948,000 Google+ user profiles and tracks many data points about the users, including gender. It had indicated 73.70 percent of users whose profiles it crawled were male and 24.74 percent 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," Allen said. — LBG, GMA News