Puzzling women (and men)

[+The Rat]

The title is not meant to imply anything negative (or positive) about women. I merely got curious about whether women like to puzzle cache as much as men. In other words, are puzzle caches primarily a "guy thing." So I visited two large geocaching facebook groups that had a list of members' true names and geocaching names. I then viewed their profiles and recorded how many total finds they had and how many of those were puzzles. People who list their names in such groups are probably more serious about geocaching than the average geocacher, so I'm not claiming this set of data represents the universe of geocachers, but I think it's reasonably representative in percentages, if not in absolute numbers. There were 64 women and 89 men used to make the comparison. I eliminated anyone whose sex I could not tell from the name (e.g. Lee, Shawn) or who had mixed sounding names (e.g. SmithFamily). It turns out women do have a lower percentage of their finds in the puzzle category. See the chart below. The .25 line means 25% of the finds for a cacher were puzzle caches. On average women have less than 10% of their finds. With men it's slightly more than 10%. The Male/Female comparison is shown in pink and blue on the left. While I was at it, I compared those of either sex who have found less than 5000 caches with those who found more than 5000. There were approximately equal numbers in those two categories. That's the chart on the right in teal and red. Every cacher in the study has a mark in each pair. It seems that those with more than 5000 finds have a higher percentage of puzzle caches. That seems counterintuitive to me. I'd be curious if others have opinions on this.

 

[+narcissa]

Did you apply any tests to see if the difference is statistically significant?

[+CAVinoGal]

2 hours ago, The Rat said:

 It seems that those with more than 5000 finds have a higher percentage of puzzle caches. That seems counterintuitive to me. I'd be curious if others have opinions on this.

Interesting study, and I appreciate the time and effort in gathering all the stats!

I'm only commenting on this one aspect though - it makes total sense to me.  I've logged less than 200 finds, the majority are traditional, though I am working on some puzzles.  I cache with a friend who has a similar # of finds, and she hates puzzle caches - she just wants to go and find...  which may be the case with many (new) cachers.  Puzzle cahes are more of a challenge, and take some effort.  It may not appeal to someone until they have been caching for awhile and are looking for more of a challenge.  I would expect to see the puzzle cache % increase with an increase in finds.

OK, one more aspect, male vs female.   What's the ratio of male to female geocachers overall?  Does that have any bearing on your results?  Does geography or demographics have any bearing?  Way too many variables here!!

Edited July 20, 2017 by CAVinoGal

[+The Rat]

I may try statistical tests as suggested, but I haven't done that yet. However, I do see a potential bias for the second comparison, i.e. the one on number of finds. One of the groups I used is the San Francisco Peninsula Geocaching Group, which is where I live. This area, part of Silicon Valley, is known for the high volume and high quality of both puzzles and geocaches in general. The other group was an international group, but I only used the members who indicated they lived in the United States. So I think it likely there are a lot more geocachers around here in this puzzle-rich area who have high find totals than in other parts of the country. If this is true, then the reason high-volume finders also have high puzzle percentages might be due to the fact that a lot of them live in puzzle-rich Bay Area, not because high-volume geocachers gravitate toward puzzles. However, I don't think that would skew the first comparison. The percentage of females and males in the two groups was about the same, I think, so whatever difference geography might make should apply equally to both women and men. However, I've been doing puzzle caches around here since 2002 and know most of the hard core puzzlers. I'm quite sure that men dominate in numbers, although, of course, there are some wicked smart and avid women puzzlers, too.

Edited July 20, 2017 by The Rat

[+redsox_mark]

My local observations - both setting puzzles and solving them  - are that women are as active or more than men.   But I don't have statistical data on this.

[+fizzymagic]

I know which one is me!

It would be interesting to do rank-order statistical tests, but the biggest issue (as you point out) is how representative the data is for the world at large.

[+igator210]

One statistical variable that will be hard to incorporate... for any individual you looked at, what is the percentage of puzzle in the area they live. I live in an area that is decent in puzzles, therefor my puzzle percent is decent compared to my traditional percentage. If you look at people in the high desert region of California, there are very few puzzles as compared to traditional. These regional biases should be addressed (somehow) for a better understanding of the statistics.

[+AnnaMoritz]

Interesting question. To me puzzle affinity has at least two quantitative parts (besides gender): percentage and absolute numbers.

 

Some are avid puzzlers but are also fanatic geocachers that have to do all the stuff that is there, no matter what cache type. Others prefer to visit (or at least log online) mostly Unknown caches (or another preferred cache type or FTF only ...). People new to geocaching often start with traditionals until they figure out that there is also something else. Others visit at least one cache per day and thus 'have to' visit all available caches. 

Nowadays more female geocachers are visible, not only as part of a team, but there are still more male geocachers and to me they seem to be more into numbers and competition of any kind.

 

Around here there are plenty of puzzles to choose from, from easy to extremely difficult, so finding puzzles is not restricted by lacking puzzles.

 

For geocachers from my city I looked up the top 150 finders of Unkown caches, that is more than 493 Unknown(puzzle) finds at the moment, 6166 being the highest number, if I remember correctly >80% are also in top 150 all cache types, <20% are finders not in top 150 all cache types, with less than 3568 finds total (data project-gc). For most of them I'm quite sure about their gender (from having seen them in person or from logs) and whether a user name stands for a team or not, for the rest I tried to look it up,

 

Not surprisingly males are the biggest group, 87 of 150, female 36 and teams 26, for one I don't know. I'm not sure about the general portions of male/female/(mixed) teams for all geocachers around here, but 2/3 males and teams with males doesn't seem underestimated to me, so maybe the first 150 are quite representative.

 

For 12 (14 % of 87) males and 9 (25 % of 36) females more than 25 % of the finds for a cacher were Unknown(puzzle) caches. Both max # Unknowns and % Unknowns are males, followed both by females.

 

There are male and female puzzle freaks around here. Here more males than females seem to be enthusiastic about the most difficult technical puzzles, but IT is also the field most of them are well-trained and working in which gives an advantage.

 

Personally I think it depends more on personal background, interests and sometimes education than on gender whether one is doing/could do/wants to do more or less puzzles of a certain kind and difficulty. That might differ considerably elsewhere where people have to follow stricter norms on gender roles which stuff (IT, nature science, technology...) and which education and interests are more suitable for boys than for girls. 

 

 

Edited July 20, 2017 by AnnaMoritz

[+noncentric]

Interesting chart and topic that "The Rat" started. It's refreshing to see a new topic in these forums.

The difference doesn't seem very large, so it would indeed be interesting to see whether it's statistically significant or not, and at what confidence level.

 

One variable that I think could affect the ability to address the core question is:  What is a cacher's true 'puzzle' percentage if challenge caches are not included, since those aren't really 'puzzles'?  It would be very onerous to try to slice out these numbers for each cacher, so it's not something I'd expect you to do. I'm not even sure that it would have a significant effect on the analysis. Just mentioning it as a possible source of 'noise'.

 

I agree with AnnaMoritz about the role of IT knowledge/skills.  I've heard that many puzzles in the Bay Area are solved using coding techniques.  I don't know if it's really "many" or "some" down there, but I've certainly seen puzzles in the Puget Sound area where writing a bit of code makes it easier to solve.  Since the tech industry is currently dominated by men, especially in the technical roles, then that could influence why men have more puzzle caches.

 

Your observation that "those with more than 5000 finds have a higher percentage of puzzle caches" makes sense to me.  Some possible reasons:  it takes time/experience before cachers start tackling Mystery Caches, cachers with fewer finds may have plenty of unfound trads in their area and won't resort to mysteries until they run out of nearby trads, cachers with fewer finds likely won't qualify for many challenge caches that appear in their profile counts as puzzles, cachers with 5k+ finds are more likely to know other cachers and thereby have more resources for help solving puzzles, etc.

[+niraD]

3 minutes ago, noncentric said:

One variable that I think could affect the ability to address the core question is:  What is a cacher's true 'puzzle' percentage if challenge caches are not included, since those aren't really 'puzzles'?  It would be very onerous to try to slice out these numbers for each cacher, so it's not something I'd expect you to do. I'm not even sure that it would have a significant effect on the analysis. Just mentioning it as a possible source of 'noise'.

If you start ignoring challenge caches, then you should probably ignore bonus caches, beacon caches, and other non-puzzle caches that fall into the mystery/puzzle category. And in some areas, simple "copy digits from a plaque" multi-stage caches are listed as mystery/puzzle caches, and they aren't really puzzles either.

[+noncentric]

8 minutes ago, niraD said:

If you start ignoring challenge caches, then you should probably ignore bonus caches, beacon caches, and other non-puzzle caches that fall into the mystery/puzzle category. And in some areas, simple "copy digits from a plaque" multi-stage caches are listed as mystery/puzzle caches, and they aren't really puzzles either.

True.  As I said, it would be very onerous to try to and figure out how many of a cacher's Mystery caches are really 'puzzles', that need solving.  And it may not have a significant effect on the analysis anyway.  But it is something to consider, especially if trying to glean some gender-related difference between puzzle find percentages.

 

There may be some cachers where a sizable percentage of their Mystery cache finds are Challenge Caches.  If that were easy to identify, then perhaps excluding those cachers from the population would make sense.  But again, is it really enough to make a difference?

[+The Rat]

Based on the sample size and the degree of difference between sexes (M have a 33% higher puzzle rate than F) I believe it is statistically significant. Commenters have pointed valid issues of "noise" (e.g. challenge caches, availability of puzzle caches in the area) but I believe those apply equally to men and women or nearly so. Although I haven't done the analysis, it looks from these data that men are also more likely to have more than 5000 finds. The right and left sides of the two comparisons look quite similar. Toward the upper end of the right-hand pair at least you can tell whether the cacher is male or female just by looking at the left hand pair. As we know, correlation does not mean causation.

[+AnnaMoritz]

Is it more likely for male geocachers to have more than 5000 finds?

I would start with: How likely is it that someone with more than 5000 finds in a given area is a male geocacher?

For this question the answer is simple (for my city), it is M:F 3.6:1.

Does that mean that male geocachers are more likely to have more than 5000 finds?

The answer obviously depends on the percentage of male/female geocachers in the area. This isn't easy to determine, you might know 50, 100, 150 or even 200 or more geocachers, but there are many more. Some never attend events and female geocachers here are more likely to have nothing descriptive in their profiles and no pictures showing more than part of a hand holding a GPS, but some men are also prefer to keep a low profile. Not only a few women use masculine forms instead of using feminine ones when referring to themselves in logs (and argue this isn't only the masculine but also the generic form in my language). With some effort you could use gender markers in pronouns and other words in logs of other geocachers referring to unknown geocachers to determine the gender. 

You could count attendees of different events and now maybe find a avergage ratio let's say of M:F 1.5:1 or 2:1 (almost 1:1 for a 2 girls just married event), but then there are M+F teams and many don't attend events at all. You could count active writing members of local geocaching forums - that definitely isn't representative here, that would be M:F >4:1.

My impression is that now there are still more male geocachers than female geocachers in my area, I would think not more than M:F 2.6:1 and not less than M:F 1.4:1 for active geocachers.

So if it is M:F 3.6:1 for more than 5000 finds and taking even the upper bound of M:F 2.6:1 then male geocachers are definitively far more likely to have more than 5000 finds than female geocachers around here.

For puzzle percentage I don't see such a difference for my area. For the small 25%+ subgroup of the top 150 (494+ Unknowns) here it is M:F 1.33:1, similar to the lower boundary M:F 1.4:1 for active geocachers here. For all geocachers, not only the more active participants it might be quite different. And for other regions too.
 

[+WarNinjas]

I would think that cachers with over 5000 finds have found more puzzles because they cached out the area and to keep playing would need to solve puzzles to have caches to find in the area. I am a male and don't really like to work on puzzles for the most part.  I mostly cache while out working all over the place and just find caches where I am but don't want to work on puzzles most of the time.  I still do but prefer just to go look for a cache.

[+The Rat]

15 hours ago, WarNinjas said:

I would think that cachers with over 5000 finds have found more puzzles because they cached out the area

Of course anyone with more than 5000 finds (or any other number) is likely to have more puzzle caches than someone with less overall finds, but I don't see that as dictating that they would have a higher percentage of puzzle finds on average. When I compiled my stats, I just used the number listed as "All Mystery Cache Types" which includes anything marked with a ? and Geocaching HQ. That would include challenges. But you may be right that those most driven to high numbers are more likely to have thoroughly cached out (no plug intended) an area and even if he or she is not enamored of puzzles, may find it easier or more convenient or practical to solve a nearby puzzle than drive many miles to the nearest unfound regular cache. They may also be more likely to want to complete challenges like the Well-Rounded Cacher (Fizzy Challenge) which require finding puzzle types.