the ryan king

While helping a friend get started on Yet Another Social Networking Site today, the topic of gender balance online came up again. It seems that no matter what, every online or technology related social situation ends up with more men than women being involved.

Now, I’m not a social scientist, so I don’t having any defensible theories on why this is the case, nor any solutions for fixing The System, but I do have an idea/experiement I’m going to try.

I have accounts on a bunch of social networking sites, but there’s only two that I use on a regular (daily) basis: flickr and dodgeball, so my experiment will be confined to just these two sites.

My experiment is this– I’m going to create and maintain gender balance in my list of contacts on those sites, equal numbers of men and women. In the short run, this means removing men from my contacts lists, but so be it.

I’m sure this seems to many like a superficial, simplistic and artificial way to solve this problem, but seriously, I’m frustrated and don’t know what else to do. Hopefully this is a good starting point.

Who’s with me?