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"If you were to throw a dart at Google+, it would be more than twice as likely to land on a man's profile as a woman's profile. Although the social network, according to recent estimates, has improved its gender ratio since it first launched, men still drastically outnumber women.\nSocialStatistics and FindPeopleOnPlus, third-party sites that gather data from about select Google+ profiles, both report that about 68% of Google+ users are Male. In July, they estimated that the percentage of male users was 87% and 74% respectfully.\nThis improvement, however, is partly due to a change Google+ made in mid July that allows users to pass on the option to state whether they are male or female.  And even if the option to keep gender private made no dent in gender ratio, Google+ still has a long way to go before men and women are represented equally in its circles.\nThe most obvious factor in women's relatively small presence on Google+ is that the new social network has attracted a largely technology-focused crowd. On the almost two million profiles tracked by FindPeopleOnPlus, two of the top five most popular occupations listed (excluding \"student) \u2014 software engineer and software developer \u2014 are computer science related. The top employers listed in the same profiles are IBM and Google. While technology is not the only topic of conversation on Google+, it is enough so to have persuaded The New York Times to announce that it would use its Google+ page to post technology related news (it has since expanded to other news as well).\n\"This network has shown itself to be a place that encourages deep conversation,\" wrote the paper in its first post on Google+, \"and from what we\u2019ve observed so far, many of you are passionate and smart consumers of technology.\"\nWomen earn only 17 to 18 percent of the bachelor\u2019s degrees in engineering and computer science, according to the New York Times, and it makes sense that a network with a disproportional number of technology professionals does not include equal numbers of men and women.\nWomen may not dominate computer science demographic, but they do use social networks such as Twitter and Facebook more then men, according to a study from Pingdom that is based on Google Ad Planner data. \nGoogle+ ads and marketing have focused a lot on women, suggesting that Google has hopes that more of them will eventually take to its platform. But given the lopsided gender ratio in tech, the social network is unlikely to attract more women without also becoming more mainstream.\nOn Monday, Google+ introduced brand pages, which allowed businesses and media outlets to join for the first time. The presence of brands and news outlets has the potential to round out the conversation to new topics \u2014 could it also help even out the gender ratio?\n\n\n\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2011/11/09/google-plus-gender-ratio/>