Statistics

My parents did a very good job of raising me to be race-blind, which has resulted in some social embarrassment ("Why are they casting an Asian actress for Cho Chang in the Harry Potter movies?  Isn't she blonde?" "What do you mean the guy who plays Morpheus in The Matrix is African-American?").  But lately I've realized that I have some deeply held prejudices on male/female behavior.  Well, mostly male behavior.  And it's not many.  Mostly it boils down to these two.

1. Single men do not own cats.
2. Men do not use Pinterest.

I don't know where the cat one came from.  Maybe because it's always crazy old cat ladies.  Multiple cats are the sign of female spinsterhood.  Maybe it's because I went out with one guy who turned out to have cats and he was the most immature, tied-to-the-apron-strings person over 30 years old that I have ever met.  And of course there are exceptions.  Men, as part of a couple or a family, can of course own cats.  There just has to be a woman or a child as part of the equation for it to be normal.  Alternately, if a single man had inherited a cat from a relative and his ownership of the cat was keeping the cat he already knew and loved from death or stranger adoption, then sure, that's fine. 

The Pinterest one I wasn't sure of.  So I had to figure it out.  Why did I think men don't use Pinterest?  Just because everything I see on there is about crafting, cooking, decorating, cleaning, and exercising?  I noticed that Pinterest knew exactly how many of my Facebook friends were on Pinterest.  I know how many Facebook friends I have, so that was pretty simple math.  With the data set of my Facebook friends I found that:

44% of my female friends had a Pinterest account
10% of my male friends did

Of those with Pinterest accounts,

23% of my female friends were inactive
59% of my male friends were

where inactivity was defined as accounts with fewer than 20 pins and no activity within four weeks.  So in total,

34% of my female friends actively used Pinterest
4% of my male friends did

If I also eliminated accounts with no activity within five months, only 2% of my male friends were active on Pinterest.  Of those four, two are artists, one uses it for his travel business, and the last one is my cousin.  Three of those four are married.

So that's why I don't think men use Pinterest.  Because 98% of them don't.

Good job, brain.  Now work on remembering how doorknobs work.