This is an early stage of what will become a tool for tracking the development of Meetup groups in Nassau County, Queens and Suffolk County, New York.  To learn more, check out Making the Most of Meetups.

Future reports will include county-by-county (and town-by-town) analyses of the topics favored by Meetup members in our area, activity levels of groups, and geographic analyses of group distribution across the Island.

As Meetup.com is not an online dating site, there is no provision for members to specify their gender in their Meetup profile.  To perform our analysis, the member roster of each group for which data is available is retrieved, and for each member, the name used on Meetup is compared to the most popular baby names as reported by the United States Social Security Administration (and metaphones of the same names).  A guess is arrived at (male, female or unknown), and the results tallied.

The final rough gender percentage is arrived at by dividing the unknown tally proportionally according to the ratio of names guessed to be male and female, respectively.

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