Just the stats

A List Apart is currently running a survey to gather statistical information about the web design/development community. This certainly could be a cheap ploy to enhance their advertising through targeting a demographic or two, but I have great confidence in intentions of the people behind it. Especially in the context of Jeffery Zeldman’s article “Women in web design: just the stats”, I have the feeling that this survey is a continuation of the fact-finding mission to which the “A(n) X Apart” venture has recently dedicated itself.

In that vein, I took the survey, and wrote a long comment about the extent to which women make up part of Yahoo! Germany’s engineering team. I’d suggest you do the same. This could be a valuable tool to start digging into the demographics of our profession, and I hope they decide to make the data as available as possible for future research.

Update: The latest post on Zeldman’s blog, “The Web Design Survey” and his comment on this post, make the goals behind the survey crystal clear:

The information it collects will help us form a long overdue picture of the ways web design is really practiced around the globe. The more people who complete the survey, the richer and more detailed the picture will become. … After we close it, we’ll slice and dice the data and present our findings in a future issue of A List Apart.

It’s not an advertising ploy, it’s quite simply a gift to the community. Let’s take advantage of it.