Which players are most (and least) popular with men vs. women?

December 29, 2022 by Jesse Weisz in Analysis with comments

This article is part of a series intended to provide insights into disc golf fandom. These insights will come through analyzing a rich data set produced by the first-ever Ultiworld/StatMando fandom survey. If you wish to learn more about the survey and the demographics of the survey respondents, please read this accompanying article. To see which pros the respondents root for and against, please read this article. We have also released this article and this one on the respondent’s relationship with disc golf and how they see the sport.

This article will investigate how gender affects who we root for. The gender breakdown of the survey respondents was as follows: 1351 males, 60 females, and 12 non-binary respondents. The graph below shows the difference in average fandom score between female and male respondents. The players in blue with positive numbers received higher scores from female respondents, while players with an orange bar with negative numbers are the players that male respondents gave higher average scores to.

• On average, female respondents gave female players higher fandom scores than male respondents gave to those same female players. The same is true in reverse, with male respondents, on average, giving male players higher scores than female respondents.
• Scoggins had the largest gap with female preference. She averaged a fandom score of 8.77 with female respondents and 7.59 with male respondents. Salonen similarly had a gap > 1.
• Drew Gibson has the largest gap for male preference with an average fandom score of 5.70 for male fans and 4.15 for female fans. Smith and Williams also had a gap > 1.
• There were a few male players that were slightly preferred by female respondents: Gilbert, Lizotte, McBeth, Wysocki, Koling, Leiviska, and Klein.
• There were only two female players that were slightly preferred by male respondents: Panis and Korver.
• I wondered if men or women gave higher fandom scores overall for all players. Surprisingly, they have nearly the exact same overall average fandom score; 6.49 given by female respondents and 6.50 given by male respondents.

We were also interested in understanding how closely respondents follow the FPO and MPO…