Who In The World Cares About Gender Equity In Science?

Thanks to Scienceblogs, I have access to Google Analytics for my blog, which means I can obsess over a wealth of information and statistics. It's amazing what Google knows about my blog. Let's hope Google always and only decides to use its power for good...

Anyhoo, one of the things I can look at is where you, my fabulous blog readers, are situated. I can look by city, region, country, sub-continent region, and continent. Just for the heck of it, I thought I'd take a peek at what countries y'all are hanging out in. I thought I might get a nice handful of countries - surely Canada, Australia, England, and some folks from the European continent; and then who knows? I mean, this is a fairly U.S.-centric blog, though I do try now and then to remind myself to think a bit more globally. But my expertise is not as global as it could or should be.

Anyway, I set the date range from June 12 to June 20, 2007. And I chose "country" from the list, and clicked away. What do you think I found?

I was truly astonished to find that in the past week, visitors to my blog have come from no less than 55 different countries. This counts all countries that have provided at least one visitor to my blog. Far and away the biggest bulk of visitors comes from the U.S., of course, followed by the United Kingdom and Canada. But the Israelis have the longest attention spans, with average time on blog at 12 minutes 51 seconds,folllowed by citizens of the Czech Republic at 9 minutes and 18 seconds. (Does this feel creepy? Like someone's looking over your shoulder? That's just Google.) Here's the whole glorious list of 55 countries represented by at least one visitor to at least one page in the past week on Thus Spake Zuska:

Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Cambodia, Canada, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, France, Gabon, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong SAR China, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, and the United States.

I thank you all for your interest, even if you landed here by accident. And clearly, some of you did, if I can judge anything by the search terms that led some of you to my blog. I can only hope you found something here of interest in this brief interlude during your internet porn search.

But I prefer to think that most of you landed here because you do care about gender issues in science and engineering, and if so, I hope you've found something here that's been useful or that's helped sharpen your thinking.

I wonder - would any of my Sciblings care to take a look at where in the world their readers are coming from, and let the rest of us know? Just for fun.