TWiT.tv’s Audience are Highly Educated, Tech-Savvy Early Adopters

57% Ages 25 to 45. Wonder what the “boomer” percentage is?
94% Male. Seems sad. Would have thought more ladies in the audience?
80% Audio & 20% Video. Cost to produce video for only 20% must remain a major concern however I also wonder if boomers are more likely to be in that 20%?

Reference Document

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It’s was my experience 10 years ago in the professional software side that not many women ever made it to C level or above. I am sure there have been studies on why that is, and why IT has been less appealing to women, but I think that changes will take time. When I was a child geek, all the other geeks were male. When I took Computer Science in high school (at that point it was too new for there to be anything at a lower grade) there were about two females in a class of 30+. Role models need to exist to encourage young girls to consider the career path.

2 old phrases jump to mind
“Horses for courses”
“You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink”

People don’t want to accept that some people are just not interested in a job or vocation, just as you can real off a list of jobs you would not like, so can any one else.
What is the % of men to women that work in the sewers, collect the bins or work on a trawler ship, are psychiatric nurses or hospital porters ?
Do any of you want to do any of these jobs ?
Make a random group of all men, or all women and force them to train at the same job whether they like it or not, and you’ll see similar dropout rates, as some realise they just don’t like or understand what they are doing.
It isn’t about being male or female, it is about having an interest in something, or being able to “do the grind” if you have no interest, but do have the ability.
In the UK almost all veterinary practices are all female. It used to be almost all male.
This change happened after a TV documentary series following a group of student vets as they learned their trade.
One vet in particular caught the eye of the camera and the public, and she inspired a generation of girls to take up veterinary practice.
However that has now lead to a problem of lack of vets prepared to deal with farm animals, and we desperately need more men to go back to it, if that is the solution.
If the solution is to educate existing female vets in country practice, and they will stick with it, then that is the current better option. They are already equipped with most of the knowledge.
Being covered in cow-crap and shivering while the wind and rain lash at you, as you lift a heavy calf onto a truck is not going to be for everyone. Male or female it is not a nice prospect.
You go home stinking, but happy you earned you crust for the day.

Currently 50% of the general populace UK goes to University, compared to the previous 5% of the “cream of the crop”.
That has not made a highly educated population. Just a lot of unemployed people with pointless qualifications facing the prospect of stacking shelves, flipping burgers or fizzing coffee for a living.
We have created a generation so disconnected that people now think if you didn’t go to Uni that you have no education and are some sort of bog-hopper.
A real example:
My friend left Uni with a degree in creative writing, and a few years later is working as a kitchen porter in the Uni. (he likes this sort of job as it does not conflict with his book writing).
A kindly girl at the Uni starting her second year takes pity on my friend and offers to teach him how to use the Library.
He laughed and thanked her, and then explained he was the person responsible for organising the library while he had been at Uni.

When the local town just had an art Collage the mix was far more equal, and the students were very much part of the local flavour. Falmouth college of art was world renowned and the local community were proud of it.
Art attracts male and female alike in similar amounts.
however if you play Venn diagrams you can break it down a bunch of ways.
For example, how many do art courses for themselves personally or to gain work in the commercial sector ?
You will probably see a disparity there between male and female, with more males aiming at art = wages, and females tending to be more traditional artists that don’t want to compromise the art for the sake of money. More females did the old wicker and basket-weaving courses than males. Book binding courses were fairly even. Illustration more males.
Since the Uni took over it has got rid of most of the traditional art courses which were why many women went there. Now it focuses on commercial art because they are only interested in getting students to pay their loan back.

Like many Universities in the UK the chancellor is a female but it does not seem to make any difference to how they run the “fish in a barrel” game.
Her eyes are just as filled with greed as any male in her job, and she has managed to give herself healthy pay rises all the time the Uni is still in debt.
This impressed the business community of jolly old England so much, she was awarded a new years honour by the queen, and now has a title, and can agree with all around the table that she must be worth an even bigger pay raise this year.
Hooray for education, wearing the right tie, and the fiscal rewards for those in the right clubs and shell companies.

As an ethnic minority (Cornish) I don’t see any effort to make sure that at least 50% of the jobs and homes in Cornwall are kept available for the Cornish.
Since the Uni setup shop in the local town we now have 75% of the rental housing allocated to students at a much higher rate than the local rent was.
Of that 75% most have come here from outside Cornwall.
Male or female, who cares when people can no longer afford to live where they have connections and family.

OK enough of that, lets get back to tech…

You see a disparity in takeup and adoption everywhere you play at Venn diagrams.
In 1996 PNG was released. The Amiga world took to it immediately, glad to wipe our feet on GIF finally but the Windows, Mac and Linux world took 10 years to really start using it, and was always behind the current builds. Photoshop was notoriously outdated.
It wasn’t until web devs started using transparent effects more that finally the browsers caught up.
Weirdly IE for Mac was ahead of the game and had transparent PNG support before the other browsers (Amiga browsers were all using it already).

There is no reason for using GIF since 1996, but the Windows world won’t leave it be, same can be said for ZIP which has been superseded multiple times by everything else, compression and reliability is better in everything else, and security in the form of recovery records, but it seems good ideas are not enough to make people adopt.

Look at the amount of time lag between HTTPS being available and adoption.
Same goes for DNSSec which is now arguably already beyond it’s time before most people have heard of it, and only recently made a standard option for cloudflare users.
No idea what % of the net cloudflare represent, but a minuscule fraction of those using it have configured DNSSec.
Why ? a) most have no idea what it is or why they should use it. b) No browsers support DNSSec validation so will never show any error.
Imagine if browsers supported encryption but had no way to show you if a cert was valid.
DNSSec usefulness 99% adoption rate 1%

The 1%ers will all be nerds, and yes most likely 99% male, but that I feel is the least important statistic in the grand scheme of things. 99% of people, men and women are doing it wrong.
As far as I am concerned the face of DNSSec is actually represented by a woman.
Not just any woman, but an angry woman that is annoyed so many men and women have not secured their sites.
Meet Anne-Marie the DNSSec pioneer

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Lol thanks for the interesting post, I did not know about this Ann-Marie Spencer but now I do. If I was her I would be raging too.

I work in IT and 90-95% male seems about right.