Comment 10 by Nunbeliever

The sad fact is that white middle-aged men more or less rule the world

I would like to know the distribution of female posters on this site around the various topics and discussions. I suspect that you will find that certain gender-neutral topics, such as here and here, are greatly underrepresented by female posters compared to other topics. If true, why should this be? Is the disparity evidence of sexism by the male posters on these topics? Maybe women would love to participate in these topics, but have grown up in a sexist society that has discouraged them from scientific or broad conceptual thinking? Or maybe, just maybe, there are no sexist barriers; females are simply much less interested in this sort of non-practical, hyper technical, or very abstract subject matter, and would rather spend their time on topics they deem much more important and interesting?

Those who automatically suspect that some type of sexism going on whenever they see a disparity in participation rates that favors men over women (but curiously no sexism exists when the reverse is observed), and therefore by implication men are at fault and corrective measures need to put in place, need to realize that this is increasingly becoming a knee-jerk, inaccurate, and harmful way to look at the Western world.

Even if every trace of sexism favoring men was erased from the world, I would not expect the numbers of prominent female rationalists, skeptics, and atheists to rival those of males, just as I would never expect the number of female posters on this site to rival those of males.