Women on Piracy

**Maelstrom** · November 11th, 2011

Hi Fellas:

For the last couple of days this subject has been in my head, I was wondering why is that in many trackers when the poll is up about gender most people are guys and only like 5% or less are women, I haven't seen any tracker with any type of rule against women so I believe the reason there are very few women on trackers is because they might not be interested at all on piracy, probably scared of consequences.

I have found this article which gave me some hope:

E-books drive older women to digital piracy - Telegraph

I looked around for statistics but the only ones I found were about anti-piracy groups.

I was wondering if any of you know some women friends (thinking we spend most of our lives on the basement, this might be hard lol), who can share their thought about why there are so little women interested on sharing information.

I know there are some nice girls in this forum, I would certainly appreciate their output, specially about the type of tracker they like the most (my guess would be music, films, general and games in that order), and if they can help with their opinion about their friends and their views on this.

So what do you think, is my perception wrong, are there far more women on piracy than I imagine? Maybe they just don't use bit torrent, and go for direct downloads, or P2P.

In my country, women are quickly catching up on technology in some cases they are above guys, so I wonder why I just can't see them on piracy, ehem, file sharing.

Any thoughts would be great, thanks.

**chadlittle** · November 12th, 2011

When it comes to music, I know tons of girls who pirate it.

I think you'll find peer pressure to be girly and do girl things might be holding back the younger age groups, most of the girls I know who are in to torrent sites and what not usually hang out with more guy friends that girl friends.

**Track** · November 12th, 2011

If they were busy torrenting, who would be in the kitchen?

Geez, kitchen jokes are old.

All jokes aside, i think girls prefer to "stream", when they want music they will use YouTube, when they want to download music they will use some sort of YouTube to mp3 website, if they want to watch a movie or a TV show they will just go to a video streaming site and watch it.

They are not bothered about quality, well that's how it seems to me.

If they do ever want anything downloaded they will just ask someone they know that torrents to download it for them.

**Insidious9** · November 13th, 2011

Let's avoid misnomers and fallacies for a second. I'm not going to make any assumptions about girls and their relations to the subject except I will make some educated guesses. Firstly we can make the generalization that men and women are two very different types of people, so they will pretty much behave in different ways. Now I believe that women don't pirate-I know plenty that do. They do however do it differently to me and some of the guys I know. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that 'most' women do not really care all that much about how they pirate, they just use it to get what they want. I think you would find the majority of women pirating through the easiest methods that require less fussing about,for example on PB. I also believe that they value their privacy a lot more than men in the digital realm-think about what kinds of comments the ladies get on the net these days...I think a large percentage would want to avoid that no? I think you will find that there are more ladies on this site and others than you might expect. They might simply be hiding the fact they are women for the above reason. I simply believe that women do it differently to us men and that's really all there is to it.

**buckyshort** · November 13th, 2011

Well, a lot of women in my family became pirates because of me, in fact, i did provide a nice buffer for my mum :) love you ma, i gave you your love back in Terabytes LOL

Cheers

**konVILEuted** · November 13th, 2011

My conclusions from careful behavioral observations:
Most girls are more social and can have fun talking all day, or doing motherly duties etc.
Guys get bored with that crap, so we turn to sports and/or other hobbies to fill up our spare time (such as computers).
Of course this is true for girls too, but their hobbies are usually not the same (and there is usually less of this).
Think sports and technology (mostly guys..)

So by that idea, there are already more technically-inclined guys than girls on the web (i think anyone here could attest).
Due to our interest in computers we learn about everything and how easy it is to pirate.
Meanwhile girls who would rather be getting their hair done might have reservations, such as. "ugh that sounds so hard, i only use my computer for facebook".
Or "I don't want to go to jail" (lack of knowledge/see final thought).

Of course there is crossover. Some guys (such as the ones who put more time into other hobbies such as sports or dating) won't use computers as much and as a result won't be as likely to scour the web and find torrent sites to answer polls on etc.
Or girls, like our very own Jenna, who are more into modern technology and file sharing etc.

As a final thought, it's also interesting to note that high testosterone levels have been correlated to criminal activity and I would assume less fear of getting caught.

At least thats my train of thought on that issue.

**oscarnater** · November 14th, 2011

Most girls I know have their boyfriend/whatever download stuff for them.

**Lousa** · November 14th, 2011

Hi,