After last week's successful poll of age, this is a continuation of what I hope to be a more or less weekly Tuesday series on dKos community social-demographics. This week "Gender and Sexual Orientation." Prior polls on gender, showed varying degrees of a male majority with 51% male, 46% female, other 1% in Dec 2004 with 888 repondents; and 61% male & 38% female in May 2005with 5171 respondents.
Hopefully, if this poll is posted up in the Recommended Diary section for at least 27 hours (24 hours in all continental time zones), we will get a large, valid and representative sample of us.
Please take the poll itself seriously, and save the snark for the comments section. After all, you did show yourselves to be more mature than the stereotype last week!
In addition to the most common Genders (Female and Male), I have taken the liberty of including breakouts by sexual orientation. Let me acknowledge that there are going to be limits and simplifications in any such simple poll of sex, gender, orientation, preference, activity, identity. After some discussion with others who have specific experience and expertise in this area, I have chosen to not included the possible categories of "Female to Male Transsexual", "Male to Female Transsexual" and "Intersex". First of all the numbers are relatively small. Secondly most (though not all) such people have a predominant current self identification as either male or female with a primary attraction to either same sex, opposite sex, or bisexual; hence they can choose within the options offered. Finally, the possible combinations becomes too many and too complicated, and begins to mix issues of anatomy and genetics in ways that don't apply here.
Some folks asked why should we do these demographic polls and raised the issue of privacy concerns. As to the why question, the simple answer is "know thyself." Who are we when we spout off and comment? Also, it can be fun. And yes, maybe it will be reported by other media or be used to market advertising to the site. As to the privacy concerns, Kos has certainly made clear his strong views against "outing" the real identities of anybody. I do not know what access the site administrators have to the data or linkages of usernames to poll responses. Myself, I am just a regular user, and have nothing to do with administration or behind the scenes here. I don't know who has voted or what age goes with whom. All I have is the same bar graph that is publicly visible. Also, there are no cross-tabs between any variables (e.g., last week's age with this week's gender). It is not like a questionnaire with multiple separate questions per single interviewee. I guess the question is a matter of what the site administrators COULD access and link or identify if they were so inclined, whether they WOULD do so; and what protections are there on system to prevent an outsider from doing so? Clearly if there were a serious breack of confidentiality/privacy, the Kos community would react badly and that could be the end of the site. The simple answer is, if you are that concerned, then do not participate. As a matter of the poll's validity, the issue then becomes, "are people who don't participate, systematically different (e.g., more likely to be gay) than the people who did participate." Hopefully not.
Last week's poll on age, was wildly more successful than I had anticipated (pat, pat, hug, hug; lol), with 11,204 votes over the course of more than 24 hours up on the recommended list. While all these polls remain inherently self selecting and are not a proper random sample, and while I am usually professionally conservative with regard to such issues, it probably is a good representation of the dKos community. The mode (most common occurrence) was the 45-49 age group (14%), followed by the 50-54 age group (13%), then 35-39 (12%) and 40-44 (11%), 50-59 (10%). We are certainly not the young geek stereotype that some have suggested for bloggers. Personally, I would be very interested in diaries from the older folks (e.g., the 19 folks older than 80 who voted).
Unlike (some) Republicans, we promise to count every vote, every vote counts, so vote!
Gender and Sexual Orientation - how do you predominantly or primarily self identify?
Which of the following BEST describes your SINGLE MOST PREDOMINANT self-identity with regard to gender and sexual orientation?