This is what journalists do. They find a story, find a source, and delve very deep into the information they have to extract every bit of juice out of the lemon – because that’s what you do when life hands you a lemon when you’re a journo.

Since The Impact Team released hordes of raw data from the backend of the Ashley Madison site, there have been multiple stories surfacing – mainly about the near-famous men who have been using the site for a sneaky affair – after all, the site’s tagline is ‘Life is short. Have an affair.’

But now, Gizmodo writer, Annalee Newlitz, sifted through all the data to see what’s up with the females users. And to her surprise, there was min to find. By now we know there were about 31 million accounts belonging to men and about 5 million to women – but it turns out that a whole lot of female accounts were created by Ashley Madison employees as test accounts – and about 350 accounts had the exact same name. Hmmmm.

Then, there was this:

• Only 1,492 of the women in the database had ever checked their messages on the site. That’s compared with more than 20 million men.
• Only 2,409 of the women had ever used the site’s chat function, versus more than 11 million men.
• Only 9,700 women had ever responded to a message from another person on the site, versus almost 6 million men. (This number was greater than the number of women who checked messages because it’s possible to answer messages in bulk when you first visit the site, without ever opening your inbox.)

So the crux of the matter is, millions of men signed up and paid for access to a site on the sole purpose of speaking to women – but their selection was ridiculously limited.

And so the saga continues…

[source: businessinsider]