@kavadni

Two last ones - GF2 and GF3 are mostly girls oriented, yep.

But I fail to see all this girls on our forum. It could be fun to have few smart ones.

yikes, 'fun?'

You rarely see women on forums, they all at the coffee shop gasbagging in real time.

@csync Hopefully just a regional difference. It's easy for people to misinterpret things.

I think most of the people on here welcome diversity, whether in gender, ethnicity, religion or otherwise. The last thing anyone wants is to alienate the very person that discovers how to make Sedna span on every card, every time... or something. :)

One of my colleagues was asking the other day about how much it would cost her to get a Nokton 25mm f0.95 and we got to talking about this site. She had asked if there were women on this site, and I said I didn't know of any specifically. But I also said that it wasn't like everyone on the site declared their gender either.

Then I realized that out of the several forums I read for cameras, I had only run into one poster in the last few weeks that had identified herself as a women, and that was on RedUser.net.

So far, the tone of Personal-View has not struck me as excessively male-centric and I honestly feel comfortable referring the women I work with here. I have every reason to believe that will continue to be the case and hope that some of them will eventually choose to post as well. Their differing perspectives are a constant asset to me in my work (and I assume would be to others as well).

Hopefully the reason they're not here is because they're in the kitchen making their men supper!! A woman's place ain't in the interwebs, it's in the kitchen!! :P

Seriously though, can't say I'm surprised in the lack of women on forums dedicated to things like bitrate, quantitization, low Gop, etc...

Ultimately women aren't driven in this area the way men are. Then the women who do have that male drive ususally apply it elsewhere, business, medicine, law, etc...

I learned a lot of the basics reading her site, though she doesn't post much video specific posts for health and other personal reasons. Her back posts of video topics are must read though.

@csync ...no.... the differences between men and women are primarily BIOLOGICAL, genetic, not cultural or upbringing.

There was a article once about twins and the one twin's circumcision was botched and they decided it was better to do a gender reassignment than try to fix his penis. They raised him as a girl and...things didn't turn out well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer

The more I hear about stuff like this...the more I believe that 70% of who we are is genetics. We're born one way or another. The rest can be adjusted by proper upbringing up 20-25% or or improper upbringing down 20-25%.

Either born with it or not. If not then you'll have to work alittle(or a lot) harder to get what you want.

Olivia shoots with a GH2. I wish she'd come here and play. She's hot and knows a lot of stuff. http://oliviatech.com/

@CRFilms and @csync - these things have been discussed in depth many times... nature vs. nurture and that whole can of worms. Arguing for no difference in gender abilities is an interesting thing to do, but even if it were true it doesn't answer the OP's question: why are there (essentially) no women on this forum? And I think that's a question that most forums could ask - regardless of topic.

It has nothing to do with gender "equality" or equal math abilities or whatever. We all get that and have a lot of respect for the prettier half of the world (or at least we should).

Maybe it's a language issue - attributing differences to being "wired" or "pre-dispositioned" is just too prescriptive. It sucks. But the ugly truth rears its head... why aren't there any women on this forum?

@csync says: "I've never noticed any gender or sex related differences when it comes to their interests or talents."

Though it seems sincere - that's a pretty incredible statement. Never? Any? Difference?

My wife is a smart, progressive, techy lady - MS in Geography, teaches at the local University... but as far as I know, she's not a member of ANY forum (I'll ask her and report back). It's not a matter of access or math ability. Sheesh, she could probably start her own PV on GIS mapping systems if she wanted to - but it's not about knowledge base or ability. It's a combo of the "wired" or "pre-dispositioned" thing, along with gender specific preferences for how we engage/communicate with others. Gasbagging in a cafe vs. geeking out on a forum. I chafe at that idea as much as the next human, but frankly, there's a biological component to the explanation of why women aren't hacking GH2s.

And sorry @csync, but the quaint notion that it's because "boys were given radios to fix" when they were growing up may have held water in the 1970's but it don't anymore. The whole feminist movement is way past trying to prove that men's/women's brains are blank slates at birth. There's just too much data saying otherwise. It's not all in the wiring - but a lot of it is.

So if you're single - you're in the wrong place. But you already knew that.

@tjnavyblue - I just don't buy it - the science on that subject is minimal, and I think it's a bit misplaced to try to railroad this conversation into 'nature v nurture' territory. I think it's fine to wave hands and point to some mysterious realm when it comes to individual talents (not to say we shouldn't try to figure out why some excel when others don't), but there's a danger in saying that gender differences are unavoidable or pre-wired.

But what's the danger? It excuses the way the world is. Pay differences, fewer women in the sciences, fewer representation in government. If privileged men think that it's because of how women are wired, there's no need for action on their part. The same argument was made to explain in the US why certain ethnicities weren't excelling and it's been completely smashed to pieces by the hard science on the issue. One of the biggest predictors for the number of women in the higher sciences? How many women are in parliament/higher government. The same underlying structural changes in those societies also allow women greater freedom in choosing scientific courses of study.

It's fine to explain away something as a "quaint notion," but this isn't in the past, it's still currently happening. Go to a toy store some time. Things are getting better, certainly, but it takes a lot of effort and time to reverse, well, just look at what CRFilms said earlier, "Hopefully the reason they're not here is because they're in the kitchen making their men supper!! A woman's place ain't in the interwebs, it's in the kitchen!! :P"

Obviously he's joking, as signified by the :P at the end, but that sort of boring 'back room humor' is certainly discouraging, not just to women, but to anyone who might have a good sense of humor (sorry).

There aren't any easy solutions to this, and I don't think it's possible to offer "that's just the way things are" and to forget about it, not after you've opened your eyes to how women, in general and on average, are given fewer opportunities to excel in certain fields - but the ones who were given equal opportunity or encouraged? I don't notice any gender differences in the way they think about science or how intelligent or applied they are. In my own personal life, and maybe I'm just surrounded with the people I like to surround myself with, I couldn't imagine someone saying that significant biological differences between men and women are responsible for fewer women being represented in the sciences. It sounds preposterous to me, which is why I'm happy to be exposed to other opinions and to have to justify my own, that's certainly healthy. You'd think that if there were biological differences that were more important than any social treatment, that women wouldn't be as represented as men in the sciences in some countries, and not in others, you'd expect it to be uniform and repeated according to the fundamental differences, but that's not at all what we see, we see it completely follow a model describing those differences as differences of opportunity, time after time.

So why aren't there women on this board? One good reason is: there are a bunch of men. I bet if it was 'seeded' with women at some point, there would be more in the future. A statistic I don't have at hand right now was that most lurkers for tech forums like this one are women, they visit proportionate to the number of women:men interested in a subject, but they lurk disproportionately - heck, I would too if half the stuff on these boards about women applied directly to me.

Sometimes it seems like someone can't post a video with a female in it without a gaggle of men saying rude things about her, or offering winks and nudges. Whether or not that's a good behavior isn't important to me, what is important is: does that make it more or less likely for a woman reading that to want to post?

@csync - good points. I agree that women have been under-represented, and that this has a measurable impact on opportunity. And I'm all for complete gender equity every time - so we're totally on the same page on that. And, I'm playing a bit of the devil's advocate on this... I've taken your side before.

I guess what I'm not sure of is that the reasons for under-representation in the sciences is parallel to under-representation on this forum. It seems like under-representation on this forum is more indicative of actual gender preferences rather than opportunity/access issues. In the OP, it's clear that access to GH2's is not the issue (70% of consumers are women). Neither is access to this forum from a logistical perspective - if you're buying a GH2, you probably have access to the internet, and thus PV.

So - are there a bunch of women lurkers here? Maybe. But I don't think so. BTW, why do we sense that most of us are not female? I've never seen someone self-identify - "I'm a man, and I'm using Sanity 5 and I love it". But it seems pretty obvious... I wonder why. And that's not loaded - just a simple why.

I feel like it's okay that men's and women's brains would tend towards behavioral differences. I don't mean for that to be prescriptive, just an observation. It's not sexist, and it has nothing to do with gender equality. It's not an excuse or "just the way things are". For me, it's the honest, if not PC, conclusion.

We can't beat Pentax. It's not the body. It's the bag. Always the pink bag.