 I was curious how much the anime fandom split down gender lines. What do men and women prefer? Is there a difference in how they rate things? What anime most divides them? Using the profile and rating data on MyAnimeList, I tried to find out. I'm not too sure how to list tables in this type of forum, so I hope you'll forgive me if I link to my analysis elsewhere, here on tumblr, and here on reddit. I hope you enjoy the results (: |
| I think a forward and more understandable would be CGDCT/fanservice/Ecchi = male yaoi/yaoi-bait = female Ohh well, you know like Yaoi on Ice or whatever the title was, I forgot... :/ |
| who would've guessed that TLR, Shinmai Maou no Testament, and DxD had a primarily male audience definitely not me that's for sure Idk, I don't really see what this accomplishes tbh, but if you wanted to make it then you do you |
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| Is shoujo ai actually targeted at women? |
| Avatar character is Gabriel from Gabriel DropOut. |
| Female idol anime tend to have an equal split of the fanbase by gender or close to it, male idol anime are always at least 95% female fanbase or more. However, with female idol anime both genders have vastly different reasons for watching them. |
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| Yeah, I gotta say this analysis is pretty interesting; thanks for sharing. I think the comparison of faves in each genre might be better done by showing the top ten or top twenty rather than just the top one. The comparison within a genre is a good idea, IMO, because it eliminates some of the genre-based effect. |
| Avatar character is Gabriel from Gabriel DropOut. |
| >Discussion about genders >Unironically linking Tumblr in the OP  |
removed-userAug 27, 2017 4:18 PM
| Dudes like sexy and cute things, girls are pretty much the same but wait that cute and sexy usually counts for shows filled with dudes lol |
  Ascended Taste I only came back to this site for the forum sets and to promote my RYM list... Anilist ftw still :dab: |
| Princess Jellyfish | 81% female audience | average male score = 7.75 | average female score = 8.39 We need to get our shit together, guys. |
LoneWolf said: @Josh makes me sad to call myself Canadian. |
pgmhecateii said: Full female cast tends to be a little disappointing for me, since I don´t fare well with most SoL comedy anime. There are exceptions, though. As for full male casts you can´t really help it since the whole team of a sports show is male....and I tend to like sports anime even though I hate them irl. _Ako_ said: That reminds me, the title of Yuri on Ice is a bit ironic since the "yuri" is actually yaoi.Ohh well, you know like Yaoi on Ice or whatever the title was, I forgot... :/ As I remember, someone mentioned that the title should be Fujoshi on Ice, which is on MAL, quite befitting if you ask me. It makes more sense... But yeah. At first I also thought "wtf is 'yuri' there? when it is yaoi?" anyway, not that it matters now for me or for the next year or so.... |
| this is interesting cause almost all my friends watch anime.. and the ONLY girls i know who watch more than maybe 1 or 2 anime at a time have boyfriends/husbands who they watch with, leading me to believe heavy anime watching is vastly male i mean.. what is the ratio between males and females on MAL? and if we compared our completion numbers would it justify what i've noticed? |
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EcchiKingMamster said: i've gone once to the end of the users page ( https://myanimelist.net/users.php ) for both males and females, and the result was close to 60/40 this is interesting cause almost all my friends watch anime.. and the ONLY girls i know who watch more than maybe 1 or 2 anime at a time have boyfriends, leading me to believe heavy anime watching is vastly male i mean.. what is the ratio between males and females on MAL? and if we compared our completion numbers would it justify what i've noticed? for completion numbers we only have op's 6000 sample size where "the average female user rated 78 anime vs 144 for men" |
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romagia said: EcchiKingMamster said: i've gone once to the end of the users page ( https://myanimelist.net/users.php ) for both males and females, and the result was close to 60/40 this is interesting cause almost all my friends watch anime.. and the ONLY girls i know who watch more than maybe 1 or 2 anime at a time have boyfriends, leading me to believe heavy anime watching is vastly male i mean.. what is the ratio between males and females on MAL? and if we compared our completion numbers would it justify what i've noticed? for completion numbers we only have op's 6000 sample size where "the average female user rated 78 anime vs 144 for men" its probably just the fact that women generally aren't as lazy as men are, so even if they have as much to watch as men, theyre more likely to be doing something else like i said EVERY girl i know who watches more than maybe 1 anime at a time has a bf or husband they watch with, and as someone who pretty much only has friends who watch anime, i think that says something for sure i honestly can't think of a single lone girl i know whos a hardcore anime watcher, but then again i know many heavy live action watching women so maybe many of them just prioritize those over anime |
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| @YayaChibi True for most women I knew actually, but I'm the special snowflake lazier then any being on this planet lol i know a few shut in girls, but i only know one who is a true shut in lol It's even worse when those women say they are anime fans too lmao smh well definitely not hardcore fans, although i know one who has a bookshelf of fujobait manga lol i also have a 40 year old fujoshi coworker, but im pretty sure the only thing shes watching right now is Classroom of the Elite, which is surprising to me cause she says she doesn't like when anime has "too many boobs", something i always troll her about XD im pretty sure she only watches maybe 1-3 shows a season Every woman I know at least watches 1 weekly live action show, especially my mom who binges the fuck out of those shows, but when it comes to anime, she's a HUGE weaboo and only saw Noragami, Dog and Scissors, Black Bullet, and recently she's been watching in long ass pauses Code Breaker. She thinks all those animes are god send BTW lol I don't know about priority but it sure is something wrong lol you're mom is awesome lol |
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| To observe this easier though I wish there was a statistics for anime that showed the demographics of the users that completed it separated by the rating they gave it. Like of the people who gave it a 1 and a 10 there's a pie chart telling gender difference. What I found interesting was that out of the overwhelmingly positive reviews for Chihayafuru, unexpectedly, ~75% of the reviewers were male as far as I read out of the first 2 pages (this doesn't mean anything except the possibility of it having more male likers). If it's true that this has a mainly male audience, what about it draws in males? I'd like to see more examples of this on even more specific anime in the "anime audience ratio" section. How did you get this info? |
| That was a pretty nice analysis. Yahari being mostly male was kinda suprising |
| Nice I watched 2 of the top 10 anime with the highest male % but 6 of the top 10 with the highest female %. But I only liked 2 of the female shows (Nana and Kuragehime) and 1 of the male shows (Konosuba). My bottom line tho is that both genders have shit taste. Girls hating on Spice and Wolf and Lain is especially cruel tho :(. |
| I probably regret this post by now. |
| Well... the results weren't particularly surprising in terms of the gender differences. I'm more surprised at the result of the largest gender ratio audience of each genre, I mean seriously Inou battle is the most watched slice of life by males proportionally? What? Also I'm surprised I never bothered inputting my gender, fixed that now. |
| If your favourite character is Tsutsukakushi Tsukiko, you are my soul mate. Been a long time since I've been here, I'll continue expressing myself freely and believe everyone should too. My MAL Interview |
romagia said: EcchiKingMamster said: i've gone once to the end of the users page ( https://myanimelist.net/users.php ) for both males and females, and the result was close to 60/40 i mean.. what is the ratio between males and females on MAL? and if we compared our completion numbers would it justify what i've noticed? We found a very similar gender ratio when checking random MAL accounts, it was a 2:1 ratio of guys to girls. We corrected for that in our dataset and discarded the surplus male results to even out the numbers, but even so, the average male had watched twice as much anime (at around 140) to the average female (at around 70). DDdd2222 said: I'd like to see more examples of this on even more specific anime in the "anime audience ratio" section. How did you get this info? To checked the "recently updated" list on MAL to get a list of random recently active users. |
Pullman said: Both genders (inb4 triggered) have shit taste at the extremes. The more skewed a show's audience is towards one gender, the more likely it is that the show is overtly pandering (e.g. self-insert harem fantasy). Nice I watched 2 of the top 10 anime with the highest male % but 6 of the top 10 with the highest female %. But I only liked 2 of the female shows (Nana and Kuragehime) and 1 of the male shows (Konosuba). My bottom line tho is that both genders have shit taste. Girls hating on Spice and Wolf and Lain is especially cruel tho :(. My Gender Differences 101 hypothesis for why women might like Spice and Wolf and Lain less is that those shows have a greater focus on abstract ideas that don't directly relate to people (economics, finance, philosophy, computer science, or whatever you want to call them). If university statistics are anything to go by, significantly fewer women are interested in those disciplines. |
LoneWolf said: @Josh makes me sad to call myself Canadian. |
| I'm thinking that if somebody knows Python and has a lot of time on their hands, you could make a web scraper making use of anime reviews to gather data. You could go through each MAL anime (not users because there's more users than anime), scrape the data of the genders of the reviewers and their scores, and put them into the database. |
DDdd2222 said: I'm thinking that if somebody knows Python and has a lot of time on their hands, you could make a web scraper making use of anime reviews to gather data. You could go through each MAL anime (not users because there's more users than anime), scrape the data of the genders of the reviewers and their scores, and put them into the database. That's exactly what we did, (although it was Java rather than python). |
GlennMagusHarvey said: Is shoujo ai actually targeted at women? not most of them, mostly its for men with a fetish..... there seems to be more stories about wlw by wlw these days though. (women loving women) |
Ideals, philosophy, art, culture. They live and die for the meme. - Kamukura Izuru  |
GlennMagusHarvey said: Is shoujo ai actually targeted at women? Originally, yes it's female targeted Anyway, that was a fun read, great effort, cheers |
LanzAug 27, 2017 7:36 PM
| Thanks for doing this! I've been looking forward to seeing the results and although it doesn't steer to much away from our preconceived notions about what each gender might like in anime, it's nice to have the stats to back it up at least. What would have interested me also would be the differences in age between the 2 groups. Like, for example, if something like Diabolik Lovers is more highly rated among teenage girls than older women or if there's no difference whatsoever. Although I assume it would be more difficult to gather data since not everyone puts their birthday on their profile. |
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Halicone said: What would have interested me also would be the differences in age between the 2 groups. Like, for example, if something like Diabolik Lovers is more highly rated among teenage girls than older women or if there's no difference whatsoever. Although I assume it would be more difficult to gather data since not everyone puts their birthday on their profile. I was gonna say something like this. I probably would have liked Free a lot more if I had seen it as a teenager but now it's uncomfortable. Then again I still liked Yuri on Ice soooooo I'd also know if there's a shift in preference from shoujo to josei in female viewers as they get older. Or if stuff like magical girls is more popular with young girls. |
| Signature removed. Please follow the signature rules, as defined in the Site & Forum Guidelines. |
| I was originally planning to factor in age to the results, but just finding enough female identifying profiles took quite a while, then if you factor in getting in a good range of results for different ages, I'd have needed a lot more data. However I'm hoping to keep collecting profile data over the next few weeks, build up the dataset, and include an age aspect to the analysis too. |
| Pretty interesting. Big news: Women like anime for women more than men like anime for women. I recognized more anime on the "women's" list that I have dropped than the "men's" list, though I'm not a fan of most of the anime listed in the results. The notable exception being Escaflowne (one of my favorites) in the women's list. |
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| This is really interesting! Thank you for putting hard work and a lot of your time into examining these statistics! :) |
YayaChibi said: She's good then lol well definitely not hardcore fans, although i know one who has a bookshelf of fujobait manga lol She's also good then lol. I mean when they say they are hardcore fans, that's the problem lol i also have a 40 year old fujoshi coworker, but im pretty sure the only thing shes watching right now is Classroom of the Elite, which is surprising to me cause she says she doesn't like when anime has "too many boobs", something i always troll her about XD im pretty sure she only watches maybe 1-3 shows a season She was fine until she rejected anime tity. I mean, the ass is where it is at, but don't shit on the boobs lol you're mom is awesome lol I thought until I asked her character names, and all that shit that is relevant to the anime, and she knows nothing about it, but goes around telling others she's a hardcore fan of those series. Worse part is, she's one of those 'anime is too sexual' kind of watchers, and literally shuts out other animes for the stupidest shit. I told her if she wanted a realistic anime, since she complained the animes I saw were bad compared to her TV shows, I told her watch Watamote, as its literally me in anime forum. She dropped it because the word slut was in the first 2 epsiodes She said it was vulgar, and too sexual, and it sexualizes minors, yet she watched fucking black bullet lol. She didn't even drop the shit because it was cringey for her to watch lmao lol I gave up on my hopes with her lol ok well no i don't know what to think anymore lol BurntJelly said: Pretty interesting. Big news: Women like anime for women more than men like anime for women. I recognized more anime on the "women's" list that I have dropped than the "men's" list, though I'm not a fan of most of the anime listed in the results. The notable exception being Escaflowne (one of my favorites) in the women's list. women like anime for men more than men like anime for women ftfy |
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| All you need to know is this... Tit sizes over D-cup = guys More than 2 abs visible = girls High chances of random wind gusts = guys Random assortment of rose petals = girls |
kotokoto said: That's what I thought, in contrast to what the linked article says.GlennMagusHarvey said: Is shoujo ai actually targeted at women? not most of them, mostly its for men with a fetish..... |
| Avatar character is Gabriel from Gabriel DropOut. |
BurntJelly said: I wanted to comment on this but it's actually surprising me how few of the series mentioned I've seen.Pretty interesting. Big news: Women like anime for women more than men like anime for women. I recognized more anime on the "women's" list that I have dropped than the "men's" list, though I'm not a fan of most of the anime listed in the results. The notable exception being Escaflowne (one of my favorites) in the women's list. I've seen and been interested in a bit of Initial D (the male-oriented cars show) and Yumeiro Pattisiere (a spinoff is the female-oriented kids show); I've seen Yuuki Yuuna (a spinoff is the female-oriented slice-of-life show). I've also p2w'd Kino no Tabi (whose sequel is the female-oriented action show). And I've seen much of and really like the Nanoha franchise (whose sequel/alternate-story is the female-oriented superpower show). I actually have seen parts of but dislike Machine-Doll, KonoSuba, Minami-ke (#2, #3, and #17 on the "males rate it higher than females" list) but plan to read and/or watch Spice and Wolf (#5 on that list) and have seen all of and quite enjoyed Haruhi (#20 on that list). While I plan to watch Michiko & Hatchin, Chrono Crusade, and Tiger & Bunny (#4, #8, and #20 on the "females rate it higher than males" list) but I've seen some Sailor Moon but am not really interested in it (#19 and #11 (R season) on that list). I mentioned my dislike of KonoSuba (whose second season is #9 on the most-male fanbase list) while I watched the first season of Asterisk War (whose second season is #10 on that list); I'm interested in Fruits Basket (#6 on the most female fanbase list) but not really interested in anything else on that list (including, as I mentioned earlier, Sailor Moon, which shows up in positions #17, #19, and #22). A female friend of mine once recced me Black Butler (whose sequel shows up as #21 in that list). There's other names that I recognize (e.g. Boku no Hero Academia, Infinite Stratos, Free, Grisaia, Amnesia, Akashic Records, Chivalry of a Failed Knight, Fate/, CCS, Hibike! Euphonium, Gundam, Detective Conan, FLCL, Cutey Honey, Highschool DxD, Yuri on Ice, Escaflowne, etc.) but I don't have enough of an opinion on them to say much. Incidentally I didn't expect Michiko & Hatchin or Tiger & Bunny to be female-oriented shows. |
GlennMagusHarveyAug 27, 2017 9:36 PM
| Avatar character is Gabriel from Gabriel DropOut. |
| Thank you for the info gathering. N @EcchiKingMamster It depends wich countries you are checking. In France, what started the jap.animation trend was two far different shows: Nagai's Grendizer (Mazinger trilogy) and Candy Candy. (of course, we had other series before but it took off there). The result is that, despite a long 80% Shônen JUMP anime period, the whole thing was never considered a boys thing, rather a children's thing. During the time where we had mostly JUMP shows, there were still other things who had children from both sexes all over them. Like Sailor Moon, Ranma, etc. edit @EcchiKingMamster Ah? XD Well, it wasn't thanks to perverted eyes here: Sailor Moon was simply as engaging for girls and boys in pre-primary and primary schools. (boys probably because we were accustomed to japanese sentai live shows back then) What is "manly"? Things with characters like Kenshiro (Hokuto) or Cobra or the City Hunter? They were/are more than popular among older girls (example: "Ken is extremely muscular and kills and all but has a big heart behind all this weight" kind of arguments). An example of a different reception: in France, the Saiyûki series (by Minekura) were watched mainly by young/teenager boys, but the shows are adapting young women manga. |
Rei_IIIAug 28, 2017 3:05 AM
| I really don't think there's that much of a difference. Like... most of friends who watch anime are girls and only one of them likes boy idol shows. I actually have not one but TWO friends who love Eromanga-sensei. That's two girls who like a 'guy centric' show way more than me, a guy. |
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Rei366 said: Thank you for the info gathering. N @EcchiKingMamster It depends wich countries you are checking. In France, what started the jap.animation trend was two far different shows: Nagai's Grendizer (Mazinger trilogy) and Candy Candy. (of course, we had other series before but it took off there). The result is that, despite a long 80% Shônen JUMP anime period, the whole thing was never considered a boys thing, rather a children's thing. During the time where we had mostly JUMP shows, there were still other things who had children from both sexes all over them. Like Sailor Moon, Ranma, etc. An example of a different reception: in France, the Saiyûki series (by Minekura) were watched mainly by young/teenager boys, but the shows are adapting young women manga. the thing is though, women are more likely to watch anime aimed at guys than guys are to watch anime aimed at women. i'd be damned if Free! for example, has a large male audience anywhere, yet, both sexest loved Keijo!!!!!!!! and i know for sure that over here, lots of guys lowkey watched Sailormoon despite being intended for girls.. and we all know why Darek said: Wow, most guys prefer sexy girls and manly shit and most girls prefer sexy guys and girly shit... I am shocked :> Nevertheless, well done for the hard work, tho I don't know if you did not really waste your time because no one seems to be surprised by the results ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ "HEY MAN.. DON'T FORGET ABOUT US" ;) i prefer girl shit over manly shit.. thats ofc if you mean girly shit that only involves female characters |
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GlennMagusHarvey said: Is shoujo ai actually targeted at women? No, but apparently according to the graph, female are more open minded, or at least majority of them can still enjoy shoujo ai. Meanwhile the male audience tend to avoid shounen ai like a plague... also shounen ai are mostly garbage so... To be fair, I myself have no interest in shoujo ai and never as much as checking it out. So I have zero idea whether shoujo ai are just better in quality than shounen ai or what |
CrimsonMidnightAug 28, 2017 4:00 AM
 OTP: KidLaw | IzuKatsu | GureShin | EruRi | AoKi | See more!» My art » My translation » Doujinshi collection » Favorite Kurobas doujinshi BISHIES X RAP |
lady_freyja said: Hopefully, I explained the contrary just 3 posts above. Historically speaking, the GL genre is a shōjo subgenre, it is the case from the 1910s (shōjo literature) to the 1980s, try to find "shōjo-ai" works during that period that are aimed at male (shōnen or seinen), you'll find very few works, less than a dozen, while you'll find a lot of shōjo. Nowadays, since the 1990s decade, the amount of GL aimed at male increased, it is now a genre aimed at both genders, so if you search modern GL you'll find shōjo, shōnen, seinen and "josei" works. It is maybe less visible on the anime side, since it seems that the anime fan-base as the whole is more male-oriented than female-oriented (just have to compare the shōjo/shōnen ratio in both manga and anime to see how anime is far more male-oriented than manga), so you have mostly shōnen/seinen GL. But when you look at GL manga, you'll find a large diversity of demographic. Oh! We have a shoujo expert here XD Thanks for the info! To think that GL also divided into demographic... (totally new to this) I wonder if it's also the case for BL |
| OTP: KidLaw | IzuKatsu | GureShin | EruRi | AoKi | See more! » My art » My translation » Doujinshi collection » Favorite Kurobas doujinshi BISHIES X RAP |
| SOMEONE CALL NASA!!! We just discovered males are into girls and vice versa! |
| I'm terrified of anyone who unironically gives Diabolik Lovers a high score, male or female. |
| "No, son, you may not have your body pillow at the dinner table!" |
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