How many women earn rewards on this site versus men? Not a very good ratio!
Lets talk about why?
Astrobin has a big problem
What rewards? If you mean badges what would be interesting (really??) in the metrics that count is the relative percentage of female submitters against badges awarded. I bet you can’t tell.
Completely irrelevant I think…
Let’s say top pick nominations, top pick and image of the day awards start having a restriction that says ‘50:50 split for male vs female submitted images’
This then potentially means that images that are more worthy of recognition get pushed aside because ‘oops.. yesterday’s iotd was from a female, so we will ignore this masterpiece because its a female submitter, and give it to this guy because its a males turn for iotd.
The only way the system can be fair is full anonymity, when more women start contributing, more women will be represented in the awarded images. Its basic statistics.
Astronomy, like most hobbies, has a firm disparity as far as the gender of its participants. This is normal…
Clickbait title for a non-existent issue as most of the IOTD process is anonymized. And AB is probably one of the most respectful platforms toward diversity online.
Well written
Dark Matters Astrophotography · May 12, 2026, 05:28 AM
How many women earn rewards on this site versus men? Not a very good ratio!
Lets talk about why?
I’m sorry, I find it hard to believe someone would even bring something like this up. Very sad times.
Why? Because there are less women on Astrobin. Only maybe 10% of imagers are women to begin with. Then how many use this website? After that, how many submit their photos for IOTD consideration? Finally, ultimately how many create photos worthy of awards?
I’m not going to hit the load more button 1000 times in the user list so the best I got is that in the last 365 days it says there have been 1406 different users with TPN. 1128 with TP. 227 with IOTD. The easiest number I can find is from 3 years ago where Sal says there are 9000 active users that post an average of 265 images per day. I imagine that has gone up since then.
I’ll use the largest group, so TPN. 1128 out of 9000 users have gotten an award. So like 15.5%. If women only account for 10% of astro imagers, you’d have to adjust for that. So something like 1.5% of TPNs should go to women. Somebody else can look through the last year and see if that’s even remotely true. EDIT: Gemini says it would excpect roughly 68 women and 1060 men, or 6%.
Once you come back with actual numbers and not anecdotes, then maybe I’ll agree there’s an issue.