I do appreciate the OkCupid-esque effort…and please do keep it up because it’s one thing to have stats but they need to be actionable.

Metadata conversations like this can also enhance working with the RescueTime app since it can seem like I’m going about my day in a bit of a vacuum (although I do like those percentile badges).

Since that’s what I think you were sincerely trying to do here, I will excuse – just this once – what I’ll assume is an unwitting attempt to knock the women’s rights movement for pay equity back by about 60 years.

Now, if you don’t mind, I need to get back to social networking…

I’m sure OkCupid had a small minority of middle aged single women who were upset about their “Cougar” post. 37s certainly offended a lot of the startup world with their “bends over” post ( http://37signals.com/svn/posts/1927-the-next-generation-bends-over ) …

But (to be fully transparent) these data exercises are really very purposeful attention/traffic plays. The results were pretty dramatic– signups (both paid and free) and traffic went dramatically up. Cancellations didn’t budge (they were actually a little lower than average). There’ll be more to come and some of them most certainly will raise some hackles. We’re confident that smart folks will see these posts as interesting bits of data that are worth a conversation and nothing more.

Have you ever compared premium and free users? If your premium product is worth it, premium users should be way more productive. (since it looks like premium makes it easier to track more things as productive, ie. offline time, you’d of course have to exclude that for a fair comparison).

tl;dr – Whoever wrote this blog post fails pretty hard at statistics and data analysis, and in all probability life as well. Keep grinding that axe!

I wish people would take the time to intelligently criticize. I don’t know what to make of these results, so I’m opting to keep my mouth shut and listen instead.

Regarding #4 (what happened to #3?), our take is that productive time logged on the computer is CORRELATIVE with productivity. It’s possible that men spin their mice in circles in Excel for hours at a time while women use their Excel time diligently. And, like all statistics– individuals are individuals. Statistically, it would be insane to bet on Usain Bolt in the Olympic hundred yard dash given his height– unless you knew who he was. Given that women are statistically smarter than men on average, it’s quite possible that they are more effective with their productive computer time. Still interesting that when you take a population of people who overtly care about productivity and find that collectively they are using less than 50% of their computer time on productive tasks, no?