Here are the results of an informal Twitter poll regarding gender and whether or not a person engages in unpaid professional development activities and/or contributions to the profession outside of regular business hours.

Do you do unpaid work relating to your field? Such as hackathons, colleague meetups, opensource dev, etc?

— Gretchen Peterson (@PetersonGIS) December 17, 2015

This indicates that approximately 14% of the female respondents don’t do unpaid field-related work while approximately 20% of the male respondents don’t do unpaid field-related work. Two of the things I can think of that would make this poll less than reliable are:

• It was worded such that if you ever once did unpaid work you could have answered yes whereas there very well could be a genderized difference in the amount of unpaid work people do and this poll didn’t get at that.
• If you aren’t someone who generally participates in unpaid work related activities, you very well might not be on twitter to answer the poll. Twitter participation, I suspect, at least somewhat skews towards those who are interested in professional development. At least in the geo-space. Low sample size in general is also relevant to this bullet point.

However, I think that what the poll might be able to tell us is that we haven’t proven that women do less unpaid work. It was posited at a meetup more than a year ago that perhaps women aren’t as present at meetups, hackathons, and so on, because they are, on average, more apt to be doing other unpaid work (with the hidden subtext being that they were doing the childcare and household chores more than men). And further it was suggested that if hackathons and such would pay their participants, that more women would jump on that train.

This obviously doesn’t prove that at all. However, I think the only way to really get something a bit more scientific going would be to try a meetup or hackathon with a significant payment to all participants and see what results.

Ahem. So yeah, once again you were reading to find out what the answer is when you find out that the researcher says “more study needed.”

@PetersonGIS In thisGeo business I think you´ll find the 80% male /20 % female. I wonder how the result would be for nurses ?

— Lene Fischer (@Lene_Fischer) December 18, 2015

@PetersonGIS sometimes I do pro-bono work, or projects that I want to work on.

— Hans van der Maarel (@redgeographics) December 17, 2015

@PetersonGIS I've also done a few maps for @fixwikimaps & @NACIS MapLift

— Hans van der Maarel (@redgeographics) December 17, 2015

@PetersonGIS Sort of, I'm salaried so I have to manage my time to meet goals. Will do a hackathon next spring.

— Mike Dolbow (@mmdolbow) December 17, 2015