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More men than women
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Nov 24, 2021 09:39:42   #
gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast
 
This is just an opinion of mine but it seems like photography is populated more by men than by women, both in the professional realm and the amateur realm.

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Nov 24, 2021 09:49:07   #
JD750 Loc: SoCal
 
50.2% of all Professional Photographers are women, while 45.6% are men.Sep 9, 2021

Source: PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER Demographics And Statistics In The US
https://www.zippia.com/professional-photographer-jobs/demographics/

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Nov 24, 2021 10:19:19   #
BebuLamar
 
Women tend to take it as a job rather than a hobby.

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Nov 24, 2021 10:19:46   #
burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC
 
JD750 wrote:
50.2% of all Professional Photographers are women, while 45.6% are men.Sep 9, 2021

Source: PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER Demographics And Statistics In The US
https://www.zippia.com/professional-photographer-jobs/demographics/


What are the other 4.2 percent? Dead?

The field of professional photography rapidly grew more female after about 1980, and accelerated its shift in the 2000s. I saw this over the years that I attended the old Photo Marketing Association International conventions and trade shows. (PMAI is now defunct, having merged into the Consumer Electronics Show in the early-mid 2010s.)

I worked for a large school portrait company (actually three companies that merged one to the other to the other) from 1979-2012. When we shifted from film and optical production technologies in the mid '90s to mid-'00s, MANY older photographers could not handle the shift to use of computers tethered to cameras. Many of our lab personnel refused to believe their jobs were going away if they didn't learn to use computers. The folks who replaced both photographers and lab personnel who didn't face reality were predominantly younger and female, because they were more likely to have keyboard and computer skills.

I am SO glad I learned to type at the age of eight and caught the wave of personal computers with the Apple II, Mac, and PC in my 20s. That put me way ahead of my peers who thought they would never need keyboards. When our first company sold us to our second company, the second company required all managers and supervisors to be computer literate and to use email and spreadsheets. We went from five secretaries and administrative assistants down to one. Several managers went to night school at company expense.

I trained a lot of photographers, operations leaders, customer service staff, production workers, and sales people. Probably 80% were female. Quite honestly, they were more trainable than the guys...

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Nov 24, 2021 10:29:21   #
Longshadow Loc: Audubon, PA, United States
 
burkphoto wrote:
What are the other 4.2 percent? Dead?
...
...

Non-de script genders......

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Nov 24, 2021 10:37:40   #
burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC
 
Longshadow wrote:
Non-de script genders......



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Nov 24, 2021 10:40:57   #
gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast
 
JD750 wrote:
50.2% of all Professional Photographers are women, while 45.6% are men.Sep 9, 2021

Source: PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER Demographics And Statistics In The US
https://www.zippia.com/professional-photographer-jobs/demographics/


I stand corrected. But I suspect that it’s because of portrait and wedding photography being so commercially popular, two genres where women might be better equipped with people skills than are men.

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Nov 24, 2021 10:41:47   #
JD750 Loc: SoCal
 
burkphoto wrote:
What are the other 4.2 percent? Dead?


Maybe their pronouns are not him or her.

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Nov 24, 2021 10:46:01   #
JD750 Loc: SoCal
 
gvarner wrote:
I stand corrected. But I suspect that it’s because of portrait and wedding photography being so commercially popular, two genres where women might be better equipped with people skills than are men.


I experience the opposite of what you do, I know more women than men photographers I see a lot of women photographers when reading articles and perusing photographer’s web sites.

However we have to be careful making assumptions based on individual experiences because our sample size is small and that can skew our perception.

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Nov 24, 2021 10:50:06   #
gvarner Loc: Central Oregon Coast
 
JD750 wrote:
I experience the opposite of what you do, I know more women than men photographers I see a lot of women photographers when reading articles and perusing photographer’s web sites.

However we have to be careful making assumptions based on individual experiences because our sample size is small and that can skew our perception.


👍👍

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Nov 24, 2021 10:53:19   #
JD750 Loc: SoCal
 
gvarner wrote:
I stand corrected. But I suspect that it’s because of portrait and wedding photography being so commercially popular, two genres where women might be better equipped with people skills than are men.


I suspect it’s because as women were entering the market place in mass (and still are) they did not perceive photography as an occupation dominated by men.

Of course that’s a guess so we need to ask the women themselves to know the reasons.

Will the her/she pronouns members of UHH please weigh in on this conversation?

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Nov 24, 2021 10:55:17   #
burkphoto Loc: High Point, NC
 
gvarner wrote:
I stand corrected. But I suspect that it’s because of portrait and wedding photography being so commercially popular, two genres where women might be better equipped with people skills than are men.


Part of the shift has been financial. Many of the men in the industry had been there for decades when asked to "go digital." They were at the top of their pay scales, having been there for a long time. No way were companies like ours going to keep them if they didn't meet the new job requirements. Our market was taking a huge volume hit from digital sharing sites, moms with digital cameras (the evil-by-inference "Debbie Digitals," PMAI and Kodak scornfully called them), and at first point-and-shoot digitals and later, smartphones with digital cameras.

In the lab, we had predominantly older women who had been there 10 to 50+ years! All but five who learned to use computers and one who already knew how were allowed to stay. The rest were replaced by computer-literate young people. The film processors, film inspectors, film editors, optical printer operators, and portrait packers were all eliminated, or in a few cases, retrained.

In both the field and the lab, the new hires came in at substantially lower wage rates than the veterans they replaced. Still, our last employer shut down that lab in 2015, long after I left. They were soon purchased by Shutterfly. The school portrait business is far less relevant than it once was. In 1980, it looked bullet-proof. Paradigm shifts are a b with an itch.

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Nov 24, 2021 11:11:52   #
via the lens Loc: Northern California, near Yosemite NP
 
I believe, based only on my experience, that at least recreational photography is heavily populated by men. I've always thought that photography in general was heavily weighted toward men. Historically photography equipment was heavy and cumbersome and women were not allowed to travel around taking photographs. Thus, men were the only photographers when photography first got started, although a few women may have quietly tried their hand at it. In the 1930s when Ansel started Group f.64 he included women in his group and his shows and this was a first in history. As photography became popular more women took it up, but they stayed "in their lane," so to speak, photos of children and families, portrait work for the most part. Men were out in the field being documentary photographers and journalists. Even today male photographers, for the most part, are held in higher esteem than women photographers. Women have gotten into photography but like most things in society it has been an historical struggle. I go on a lot of photo tours, mostly for wildlife, and there are generally a couple of women included, but the majority of the photographers are men and there is sometimes, even in these days of change, a "good ole boy" camaraderie in evidence. There are a few women who lead photo tours but most are male photographers. Some things have changed today but many things in our society are still the same and will remain that way.

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Nov 24, 2021 11:39:01   #
cahale Loc: San Angelo, TX
 
JD750 wrote:
50.2% of all Professional Photographers are women, while 45.6% are men.Sep 9, 2021

Source: PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER Demographics And Statistics In The US
https://www.zippia.com/professional-photographer-jobs/demographics/


What's the other 4.2%? Martians? Politician? Unisex?

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Nov 24, 2021 11:49:43   #
Quixdraw Loc: x
 
You want scary ...source KTZV from Erudera (an Education Web site)

The study finds 59.5 percent of U.S. college students were women in 2021, while 40.5 percent were men.
Male students at US colleges declined from 42 percent of all enrollments in spring 2019 to 41.4 percent in 2020 and 40.5 percent this year.
Statistics show that 400,000 fewer male students were recorded in 2021, compared to year earlier.
Overall, US universities and colleges saw 1.5 million fewer students compared to five years ago, with men's enrollment falling by 71 percent.

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