/r/bulletjournal demographic survey results

I ran this survey mainly because occasionally men come into the apparently-female-dominated /r/bulletjournal subreddit, ask to see some men's journals, and get a bit of hostility.

There's two sets of assumptions here. One, by the men, that all the bullet journal images posted to the subreddit are by women. The other, by the women, that all bullet journals are genderless and therefore men should be satisfied to see bullet journals by mostly women. Both assumptions bothered me, so I wanted to find out if either of these was actually true.

I ran this survey for two days ending 3rd January 2017, with some resistance and a lot of support. There were 301 responses, and I deleted two troll responses, leaving 299 useable.

You can see the full spreadsheet of results here.

You can discuss this post on Reddit here.

Content note: WILD SPECULATION.

Age and gender

Let's start with the basics.

Age

Six people didn't give an age, but here's a graph of the rest. Ages ranged from 14 to 61, and most were in their 20s; the average age was 26.

This seems to be representative of Reddit users:

Gender

That's 72% women, 22% men, and 6% nonbinary people. (The person who chose [other] wrote "Pre gender revolution grunge metal," which I did appreciate.)

The reason this is not a pie chart is because users were able to select more than one gender. One nonbinary person also chose female, and one also chose male. Any of their responses have been counted in both categories.

These results are pretty interesting. 6% nonbinary is a lot compared to the general population, which is thought to be around 0.4%. It's also consistent with other surveys I've done on Reddit several years ago. However, the male/female split is very different; /r/bulletjournal is, perhaps unsurprisingly to many, predominantly female. Sometimes science involves confirming what everyone already basically knows.

With 1 in 4 members of /r/bulletjournal being not-women, there's two ways this can go. Either:

a) the assumptions are right and women post proportionately more (and men less),

or

b) the assumptions are wrong and people think that a bunch of posts by men are actually by women.

So I asked a couple more questions to find out which it was.

Frequency of posting photos and videos of one's own journal on /r/bulletjournal

Here's the pie charts:

The blue section is people who've never posted their own bullet journal to the subreddit before. That's over 80% of respondents. The red section is for people who've posted their own journal a bit, and the orange section who've done so a few times.

As you can see, women were more likely than anyone else to have posted their own bullet journals at all. Men had not posted their own journal more than once or twice. Since only a little over 20% of respondents are men and only 12% of them had ever posted their bullet journal to the sub... well, that's not much male representation on the subreddit.

The samples are small - only 85 non-women responded. And most people overall were lurkers anyway. But still, working with what we've got, that's a significant female bias.

"Which of the following best describes your bullet journal style?"

Here I was curious to see whether there was any gender bias in either style or description of style.

Here's an unintelligible yet colourful graph, for those of you with your spectacles to hand. You can at least see that regardless of gender, most people are somewhere in the middle - attention is paid to attractiveness and order, but not many people are going to cry if they have to scrap a page or anything.

Here's a slightly different but equally unintelligible table of data:

Those blue shades show percentages. The darker the blue, the higher the percentage. I arranged the sentences approximately by effort and prettiness, with the least attractive and effortful at the top of the list and the most attractive and effortful at the bottom, more or less.

Here we see that men are more likely to describe their style as "not exactly messy, but I don't put in a lot of effort to make it look good." Do they tend to put in the same amount of effort as everyone else but not want to admit it because girls are taught that it's okay to want to put effort into making something pretty and boys are implicitly or explicitly taught that that's girly and makes you gay and if you're a dude you should be sawing it in half with your bare hands instead of decorating it? Or do they actually put in less effort, but end up with a bullet journal that is the same, quality-wise, as a woman's? Sexism. It's an enigma.

We also see that women are more likely to describe it as "I like it to look nice but I don't go overboard."

• "Not exactly messy, but I don't put in a lot of effort to make it look good."
• "I like it to look nice but I don't go overboard."

Those two statements are so similar in terms of actual meaning, but have subtle differences in wording, and the gender split is very noticeable.

Similarly, women are more likely to say they put in a lot of effort (6% compared to none of 67 men). See the above paragraph involving men sawing up notebooks with their bare hands.

For some reason nonbinary people are really likely to be professional artists or illustrators, to say that it kinda shows, and who are fine with mistakes. Generally they were likely to be less attentive to attractiveness and order, and also more likely to post regularly. Okay, cool.

Everything else was kind of even across genders.

Some comparisons and wild speculation

Here's some posting tendency compared to bullet journaling style:

I didn't include the fourth option from the survey in this table, "I regularly post," because literally no one chose that option at all.

Basically, everyone likes their journal to look nice, but the sample for the people who post frequently-ish was only 4 people - about 1% of respondents. The one significant detail I can see is that plenty of people said they hate mistakes, but none of those four frequent-ish posters did. To put this another way, people who hate mistakes are less likely to post regularly. (Maybe. Wild speculation: check.)

For the people who had posted at all, this is tricky. They were more likely than non-posters to say that they put in a lot of effort, but also to say that they don't put in a lot of effort...?

I don't really know what to say about that. *cough* I guess, maybe, can we have more posts from people who just put in an average amount of effort, or...? No, I don't know. Carry on.

The feedback box

This part is where it gets interesting for me. I usually just expect people to tell me about problems with the questions and whatnot, but there's always lots of people who tell me a bunch of stuff I didn't ask for, and that's often pretty cool.

There was one person who basically thought the survey was stupid, but there were plenty of people who were looking forward to seeing the results, or were supportive, or were just plain grateful. Hi, nice people! o/

Here's a selection of the comments I found particularly interesting:

• It's bothered me too that people assume without any real evidence that a) there are no men in the community and b) that there are automatically gendered differences.
• [I] feel like this idea that minimalism is better just causes further division. People can take what they want from Ryder's original, and expand or take away what they don't need. It's all valid, and no one should feel bad about how they've chosen to do theirs.
• Thank you, the assumption that fancy=female is bothersome
• My husband thinks his handwriting is uglier than mine, but my bujo is much more minimalist than his is. (By a woman who's part of a partnership that defies stereotypes! Awesome.)
• I never post because I don't fit in. I have zero interest in decorating my bujo. I was looking for a sub about quick logging and minimalism (in the context of journaling) when I stumbled upon this sub. I keep an eye on it, but I don't belong at all.
• thanks for doing this lol, all the unfair assumptions were starting to become jarring
• I feel like my BuJo is too boring to post because everyone seems to be in the "Internet-famous for my bullet journals" category (I think a lot of us know this feel, anon!)
• I work with a lot of women in scientific fields (anecdotal evidence, I know) and their handwriting is not stereotypically 'feminine' (This was actually posted in the main survey thread on Reddit, but I thought it was an interesting thing, so here it is.)

The summary

In no particular order:

• Men and women basically describe the same amount of scruffiness/attractiveness, but men say they put in less effort. Nonbinary people are godlike professional artists and illustrators with perfect yet scruffy bujos and we know it.
• A fair few people were getting annoyed about the gender assumptions in the sub.
• Our ages reflect the Reddit averages, but we skew heavily female and nonbinary.
• The people who hate mistakes don't post as much. Your perfectionism is preventing you from becoming internet-famous, people!!! Let us upvote you!
• Women are in the majority, and they are more likely to post photos of their bullet journals than men, which means men are underrepresented.

My recommendation

No one asked! But I'm telling you anyway! You can totally just ignore this!

Men are asking for representation! It's happened more than once since I've been subscribing, and for everyone who speaks up there's ten who don't and a hundred who don't realise they're missing it. Representation for minority genders in a space dominated (statistically or otherwise) by a particular gender is important, and in this case the minority is men - even nonbinary people are overrepresented here. We all need to see humans we can relate to, and gender is for a lot of people a very important part of their own identity and sort of a social compass.

There was mention of a gender flair, because look, it's happened before and it will happen again. Men are going to ask to see men's bullet journals, because humans seek to see themselves reflected in the world around them. It helps us to feel visible and real. So imagine that instead of saying things like "bullet journals have no gender!!!", you could say "sure, check out this URL with a list of all the posts with the 'dudely journal' link flair!" Doesn't that feel nicer?

And you know what? Since men and women and nonbinary people have all described their styles in a broadly similar fashion in this survey, mayyyybe men will look at the dudely journal posts and see that actually there's very little difference genderwise between journals generally. But a flair might make it a little easier for them to find that out for themselves, instead of being dismissed and belittled. And that is no bad thing.

Instead of being hostile or dismissive towards men who ask for representation, let's be awesome to each other.

~

Edit: Also /u/ladymix said this, which I think is a really good point and maybe something for guys to bear in mind when asking to see bullet journals by men:

Just to possibly add a bit of my own speculation to why people are sensitive about gender assigning bullet journals, and about guys asking for guy journals.

It's not that I believe men shouldn't be represented in the community, of course they should be. It's that every other hobby, career, art form and interest that is gendered as female dominant is systemically and historical put down, decided to be less important, labeled as weak or silly or "basic". So when a guy comes in here and asks to see guy journals, because of the greater cultural context, not just this community in a vacuum, that feels like it's writing off all the great ideas and art and brilliance that women have because it's girl stuff.

I don't think anybody is doing this intentionally or maliciously, but this might be why the few of us are bristling. It's got a lot of context and history to it. It's a gut defensive reaction that may not be entirely fair.

I'm definitely coming from a place where my gender is very rarely represented anywhere, so I was starting from a place of empathy, but yeah - it's more complicated than that and some sensitivity is a good idea, I think!