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What is the gender ratio of the Esperanto community like? Is it predominantly male, predominantly female, or roughly a fifty-fifty split?

If the community isn't roughly fifty fifty, does its gender ratio reflect the gender ratio of those who are learning foreign languages in general, akin to the pipeline metaphor in STEM?

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  • Courses seem to attract more males, the normal life, from local meetings to congresses are more balanced. (Western Europe)
    – Joop Eggen ♦
    Sep 20, 2016 at 12:53
  • Many years ago I saw, in Esperanto, a joke to the effect of a young single man becoming more and more active in Esperanto, until he got married, and then nothing more was heard from him about Esperanto. (Can anyone pinpoint the exact passage?)
    – Mike Jones
    Oct 27, 2016 at 21:44
  • 1
    @MikeJones, you are probably thinking of Esperantisto, ekesto kaj malapero, a poem written by Raymond Schwarz: kabareto.esperanto.cc/ero-verdkata1926.htm
    – Charlotte SL
    Jan 12, 2017 at 19:54

3 Answers 3

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listed sex of Edukado.net members

It's difficult to conduct an accurate census of Esperantujo's real demographics, but here are some charts showing members of Edukado.net according to the sex they listed, with viroj (men/males) being the larger portion. (source)

If I had been asked to guess how many males vs. females there were in Esperantujo based on my personal feeling/observation, I probably would have come up with similar ratios.

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I asked a very similar question in another venue, as the apparent ratio of males to females that I was seeing in the public spaces was very skewed in favour of males. I got very similar answers ( 80/20 or 70/30 ) for the facebook groups for example but it was also suggested that there are differences according to which country you look at, in some countries men dominate the numbers and in some it is women.

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As Kat Ño said, it is very difficult to have data on Esperanto speakers based on more than personal anecdote. In my experience, though, the events I have attended were pretty gender-balanced, but there were probably a little more men than women. I had a look at the lists of people who registered to Somera Esperanto-Studado in the last years, and the percentage of women is around 45%. On Lernu.net, however, 55304 registered users are female, while 91704 are male, which makes 37.6% of women. I don't know if this figure is more representative or if it shows that Lernu appeals more to men or something else.

I've also read a claim in the Lernu forum that most American Esperanto speakers are men, while most Russian Esperanto speakers are female.

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