Play’s Republic

As Garrison posted below, SL has just released some fascinating statistics. While looking over SL’s data on distribution of user gender, I began to notice a trend, so I created a graph. Take a look. See anything interesting?

(Click here for the full-size graph.)

User gender distribution has been describing two inversely related curves since SL’s release in September ‘03. *(This is the user’s RL gender, not SL gender.) SL began with 35% female and 65% male users, but from that point on, female user % steadily increased and male user % steadily decreased until May 2005, when female users hit a high of 51% and male users hit a low of 49%. Here’s where it gets really interesting - for whatever reason, May 2005 was the turning point, and the distribution began slowly reverting back toward the original balance of males > females. Last month (Jan. ‘07), females had dropped to 41% and males had risen back to 59%. This is only about 6% away from the original ’03 distribution.

What could be causing this trend? What happened in or around May ’05 to effect a reversal? Because we only have percentages, not hard numbers, we can’t see what’s truly happening. Maybe around May ‘05, men became suddenly interested in SL and began to join in higher and higher numbers each month, while the number of women joining each month remained relatively stable. That would say something very different than if the absolute number of new female members actually began to decrease to May ’05, due to some kind of displeasure or disillusionment on the part of potential new female members.

So which effect is it? No way of knowing without seeing the values, and it’s certainly a mixture of both. But if we knew which effect was stronger (increasing male interest or decreasing female interest), then we could gain some interesting insights into how and why SL demographics are changing, and perhaps even predict future trends in SL user gender distribution.