Local Guides Gender Statistics

[Martyn]

After counting and analysing the contributions in the March 2017 Self Introductions I want to present you the gender specific results:

As you can see in the diagrams, we have a lot of female Local Guides in North America (43% !!) but not so many in the Rest of the World (only 10%).

I have no idea about the reasons for this discrepancy.

What is your opinion for the reasons?

What can we do to improve the relation?

Happy trails

Martin

P.S. Thanks @EhsanD and @FeliciaS for your support

[RajendrasinhC]

Interesting research sir, 

[SalvatoreM5]

Thank you for your work, @Martyn!

Could it be possible (with the help of the moderators) the raw database of the LGs that joined Local Guides Connect?

Doing so, these statistics could acquire more relevance (the thread that you mentioned could be biased by a self-selection process).

Best,

Salvatore

[Martyn]

Hi @SalvatoreM5

Yes it would be great to get some numbers directly from the source. But we both know that the chances are almost zero.

So it is much easier to collect manually

Happy trails

Martin

[ShafiulB]

What a great research !!

Thanks you @Martyn 

If we get the actual total from the Local guides it would be a complete RESULT .

[EhsanD]

Thank you @Martyn for preparing new chart.

While based on only 268 new introductions for March 2017, we can see some gaps between men and women but as @SalvatoreM5 mentioned, this might be due to self-selection bias.

Thus as others also recommended having full dataset from LGC would put some lights on this but I do suspect due to privacy issues LGC won't feel comfortable to share the raw data; however, they might be fine with sharing filtered one (removing critical fields from raw data such as email addresses, real names, phone numbers and so on) or the better solution would be the official stats be produced by LGC covering some demographics about members. We are close to 200k members from many countries here and such stats would help to find out the gaps (by gender or race/ethnicity or area or age). Because if there are some significant gaps between demographic cohorts in the LGC which might be a good sample of entire Local Guides then we are certainly missing some POVs on here and generally speaking on Google Maps. If women significantly contribute less than men then the available reviews are skewed toward men and there is a need for more reviews by women especially for businesses and locations that target women more than men.

This is really a hot topic and Google does care about equal opportunities (for example Celebrating International Women’s Day). I would suggest some decision makers like @Corrie or @TraciC or others take a look at this and raw data.

What is your opinion for the reasons? Maybe "contributing on Google Maps" sounds too technical for women especially in developing countries or maybe women do not have access to smartphones and high-speed Internet in the same way as men do or maybe it is just a matter of preference (but based on 268 dataset, differences seem to have other attributes rather than just personal preferences).

What can we do to improve the relation? I really do not know what exactly "we" can do but I think 3Es (Education, Enforcement and Engineering) will definitely work here (too broad, I know!).

[Corrie]

@EhsanD @ShafiulB @SalvatoreM5 @RajendrasinhC 

Really interesting discussion starting here - eagerly reading everyone's thoughts and insights. 

@Martyn 

Thanks for kicking this off. Could you share more information about the information you discovered based on the intro thread(s)? Are you saying that out of North America Local Guides who introduced themselves, 43% of them were women? Are you saying out of all the intros from the rest of the world, only 10% are women?

[TraciC]

I second @Corrie's comments. Thanks for tagging us in, and while we can't share further information, we enjoy reading your thoughts and feedback for sure, as Local Guides, members of the community team and as women. 🙂

[Martyn]

Hi @Corrie

Yes those are exactly the numbers. The "Rest of World" countries are all in the range of 9%-11% female contribution.

Regarding the reasons (results from brainstorming with some friends):

- Men are (more) hunters and gatherers, so they are happy when they are collecting locations

- Means of transportation, women in the US are more likely owners of a car. It is easier for them to reach a certain destination

- Eating out behaviour is different in the US, more places to see and review

- Access to a smart phone  and high speed Internet is easier in the US

- Google is a US based Company, so local women are not "afraid"

- Feed back-culture is much more popular in the US

What WE can do:

- The WE is very important, because WE as a community can do many things to encourage and motivate women all over the world to participate

- Invite your female friends to a meet up

- Show them, how to become a part of the LGC

- Let us put this topic on the agenda of the Summit in October

Happy trails

Martin

P.S.: The meet up Castle Tour 9th April is open for everyone and wheelchair friendly

P.P.S. I have to hunt and gather something now...