The women of Ashley Madison
"Almost none of the women in the Ashley Madison database ever used the site," according to
Gizmodo editor-in-chief Annalee Newitz. Gizmodo is a technology blog owned by
Gawker Media. Here's what she found:
- 5.55 million accounts are marked female (about 15 per cent of all profiles). Other sources have slightly different numbers. Dadaviz shows five million female accounts, 14 per cent of the total.
- 12,000 profiles seem to be about women who are active on the site. Most of female profiles appear to have been abandoned very soon after they were created.
- Over 9,000 accounts with female profiles had ashleymadison.com email address, while just 1,000 had male profiles or no gender specified.
- 68,709 female profiles had an IP address that suggests they were created on one of Ashley Madison's own computers, compared to12,069 male or no-gender-specified accounts.
- 1,492 women had checked the messages in their Ashley Madison accounts. Two-thirds of the men had done so (20.3 million).
- 2,409 women had engaged in chat on Ashley Madison, compared to 11 million men, or about one-third of the men.
- 9,700 women replied to a message from an Ashley Madison member, while nearly six million men had done so.
Members had to pay to have their accounts deleted, although it appears from the data dump that the data was retained.
- 12,108 women's accounts are listed as paid-delete, compared to173,838 men's accounts.
But there's evidence that Ashley Madison had female members, at least in San Fransciso.
Ashley Madison is an online dating service for married people seeking affairs. But only about 15 per cent of the members are women. (Eric Foss/CBC)
The relationship writer Charles Orlando joined the website for research purposes, he says. The fake profile he created had 20 messages by the first night. In 2011 he wrote that within days of joining he had chat sessions with 33 different women (he wonders), three of whom he eventually met.
And Jeremy Adam Smith writes in San Francisco Magazine, after the data dump, about five women he knows in the Bay Area who joined Ashley Madison.
Ashley Madison's own data shows San Francisco with the smallest share of the population as members, out of 22 U.S. cities. Members make up
0.7 per cent of the city's population, while membership in Austin, Texas and Pittsburgh accounts for
5.6 per cent of their population.
David Evans, an online dating industry consultant, says that other websites that are for sex hook-ups, like Adult Friend Finder or Fling.com, also have hardly any real women members.
