In a poll on hexbear (see link), it was observed that there are very few cis women on Lemmy. I think this is the intersection of several problems:
- engagement of women on Reddit was always low
- fewer women in computer science
- I’m hesitant to recommend anything fediversy to people who don’t tinker with computers like I do and thus might need a more handholdy UX.
I gather that transgender people tend to be more into CS, though I don’t see why that explains entirely such an astonishing presence of the transgender community on Hexbear.
Anyway, I just thought I’d open the floor to brainstorming.
You don’t try and attract a specific demographic. You just create the space you want and if they also value that space you they will choose to participate. It’s not 2005 there are women on the internet everywhere. Lemmy has a lot of women compared to reddit and mastodon has a decent women userbase as well it feels.
Hexbear is a bad representation of lemmy ignore their demographic polls.
As for actionable steps I think we are doing a good enough job already. The communities here are not toxic. The users are mature and call out sexist stuff when it happens. The only thing we could probably do is host more content that women typically tend to enjoy but that will come with growth of the site and is better done organically.
If you’re browsing ‘all’ without any filters there’s still a good portion of porn and porn-like content that’s objectfying and thus probably repelling women.