14 DAY TRIAL // There's been a lot of speculation on the gender distribution of Google+. For a long time, well as long as it gets since Google+ is only a little over two weeks old, it was thought as a boys-only club and there have been a couple of rather popular memes about this going around.
But that's changing, and fast, already one third of Google+ users, that's 3.3 million people by Google's own metric, are female. And the male to female ratio is changing fast.
Paul Allen, founder of Ancestry.com and serial entrepreneur, has been keeping an eye on Google+ growth and correctly estimated that the site would reach 10 million users early this week.
This was later confirmed by none other than Google CEO and cofounder Larry Page.
Allen is now trying to correct some of the reports which are putting some wild numbers out there, each showing a dominantly male population in Google+.
Paul Allen's method, which relies on surname sampling, indicates that, although Google+ started out with a very big male population, the ration is decreasing and there are more and more women on the site. He also criticized the methodology used by some other reports.
"My surname-based random sampling has shown a very different number. For the first time, I'm publishing it here:
7/4 - 77% Male, 23% Female 7/7 - 68.4% Male, 31.6% Female (after the user base had almost doubled) 7/14 - 66.4% Male, 33.6% Female
Google+ is quickly turning pink," he wrote on Google+.
"For comparison sake, LinkedIn, which is a business social network with more than 100 million users is still 63% Male and 37% Female according to Pew (See attached report below). Google+'s female population percentage will likely surpass LinkedIn's in early August," he further explained.