Okay, so, a couple of things, and granted, I’ve only been here a month:
This whole business about being a hot girl and being successful for it—I am a woman, and as far as I know, I haven’t benefited from it financially at all. The only time anyone has ever mentioned it to me is a couple of times that people have told me that I’ll somehow have a leg up for it. That implies to me that there’s actually a slight disadvantage to being a woman because of the perception that there’s somehow an unfair advantage. (That would be totally unsurprising since that is the case in general in life.) It could possibly be the case in a couple of isolated instances in certain corners of the site that tend to be more male dominated, but in the communities I’ve been involved in, it hasn’t been.
I’ve never purchased an upvote (unless you count enrolling in #steembasicincome, which brings in about a cent a day). I have written content that I’ve put a lot of time into, and it’s paid off in certain cases. I’ve developed a small but engaged following who have helped me find an audience. I got picked for curie a couple posts back, which brought in a nice chunk of change. I’ll admit that there’s a ton of crap on here and that some of it is (or at least appears to be) very lucrative, but it’s not something you have to engage in to be successful.
Send pics, and we will be the judge of "hot or not"
(Case in point.)
Curie/OCD are some of the few curation efforts aimed at material on the site not connected to apps, and they're woefully underfunded compared to their app-related kin.
And being a woman who marketed herself as such has clearly paid dividends to those who got in early.
I won't name any names, but their content definitely has a high variance in quality, and some are much more consistent in knowing the material they're talking about, and some don't really talk about anything at all.
I took this string of comments as inspiration and looked at some of the available numbers to see if this is indeed the case, and did a quick write up on it, if you're interested. Tl;dr: By the metrics I looked at, even when you control for the high male-to-female ratio on Steemit, women are underrepresented among the most successful users on the site. But I was only able to use certain data points and you'd have to look at other metrics as well and insert some controls if you wanted to do a thorough study.
Maybe I wasn't clear enough in how I worded my comment, but if we assume none of the devs were female, none of the original shadow-miners were female, and that it's quite possible that investment in steem reflects investment in crypto in general as far as fewer women investing big, I was saying that the numbers you're looking at makes it look like they're underrepresented, but we have to look at how a lot of those people got their initial momentum to see more of the picture. I guess we can go and see how many of the early users who weren't part of the pre-mine actually bought steem and powered up vs getting their initial posts voted on.
Oh, and we can see a clear bias as far as who got those fat, controversial delegations from steemit inc. Not downplaying the effort the real ones put in.
I hear you, and if you look at my methodology, I actually took those factors into account and controlled for them as best I could. I started off by giving men a 5-to-1 starting advantage based on Alexa statistics for the demographics of Steemit as a whole. I also looked at two metrics--follower counts, and author rewards. While both of those things are of course impacted by Steem Power, I felt that author rewards would be the more valuable metric because it would have to come from user generated content.