Are you an XX libertarian?

Ms. Avens O’Brien, west coast liberatrix extrordinaire, has developed a survey tool to collect information of libertarian women, which you can fill out here.

She further explicates:

Question I received in an email:

“I am curious to know why you are only asking for information about organizations and their female participants. I know many women who are libertarians who do not belong to or involve themselves in Libertarian organizations. Many small ‘l’ libertarians are very vocal about their ideology and continually vote for Libertarian candidates. We just don’t see organizations as a productive means to meet libertarian ends. Our work is more of an educational one, not a political one.

I feel that eliminating those of us who do not belong to organizations will not give you a true picture of the actual number of women in this country who are libertarians. I believe this information is vital if you are going to write a thorough, complete, fully researched report.

Thank you for your time,
Respectfully,
[Name Redacted]”

Since this has been mentioned in a few threads, here’s my reply in one place:

I’m asking after liberty organizations, events and news sources because they can provide percentages in an understandable and potentially representative way.

I recognize this data will be incomplete and I’ll be writing at least a couple paragraphs on that non-representative aspect itself, but the fact is, I can’t send out a form to individually poll each libertarian in the US/World and ask for their various reasons for being libertarian and their gender. I’d have a differently skewed sample if only 8000 people responded, for example, and perhaps if it polled heavily among my friends it indicated a number of women even higher than accurate due to the sample bias.

I previously did a smaller poll where I asked women who are politically opinionated 1. If they consider themselves libertarian and 2. Why or why not. One of the reasons I asked it that way is since there’s so much “women aren’t libertarians because XYZ” it was important for me to actually, accurately ask women who are or aren’t what turned them on or off on the subject. I think I will release another poll on that question after this one, and make a series of articles.

I’m absolutely interested to know about individual women who are libertarian, but so much of our writing on this topic already centers on individual women writing about their experiences as libertarians and their speculations as to why others are not.

Obviously I can’t accurate pinpoint how many people have read, say, Atlas Shrugged or Conceived in Liberty and what number of them were favorable and what number of THOSE were female. I can’t accurately pinpoint the gender split on who voted for Gary Johnson in 2012. I can’t necessarily find what percentage of libertarian-interested individuals are female from basic polls, in fact all the major polling data suffers from that lack of actual hard numbers and relies on representational polls, assuming that the percentage of libertarians can be gleaned from a random sample survey of 1000 people (or some other arbitrary number) and their gender demographics.

Whereas organizations indicate some sort of engagement in the activities that lead to female representation at conferences and the like. It can give us some useful insight on marketing, engagement, involvement, and passive interest (news sources will be helpful for that).

I promise, I don’t think individual answers are unimportant and I’d like to find a thoughtful, useful way to poll that data and produce viable results from it that have a purpose for the larger movement. I look forward to exploring this question more and thank you for your time, truly. If you have input on how to do that most effectively let me know.

Cheers,
Avens