Were there real women on Ashley Madison? Investigation finds virtually no female profiles were active

You know the few celebrity men who have been outed as users of Ashley Madison and then claimed they never actually used to site to hook up with any women? (I’m looking at you, Sam Rader and Josh Taekman.) That could be because there were hardly any real female users.

Even before the Ashley Madison leak, it was obvious there was a big gender disparity on the website: Of the 37 million profiles, only 5.5 million were registered to women. However, Gizmodo found that even those statistics were likely extremely inflated to make men more confident in their chances.

For the investigation, reporter Annalee Newitz first searched the leaked data to see how many profiles were registered to people with @ashleymadison.com email accounts, which was a good sign they were created by someone inside the company. More than 9,000 female-designated accounts fit that search. Then Annalee looked at the IP addresses used by people registering and found more than 68,000 female accounts came from the same IP address — which appears to be a “home” computer at the Ashley Madison headquarters.

Even after narrowing it down with those searches, there were still millions of potentially real women. But then Annalee considered how many times the registered women checked their Ashley Madison messages and found that only 1,492 ever read the emails. In contrast, 20.2 million men read their messages at least one time. There were similarly stark gaps between men’s vs. women’s engagement of the chat system and responded messages.

“Overall, the picture is grim indeed. Out of 5.5 million female accounts, roughly zero percent had ever shown any kind of activity at all, after the day they were created,” Annalee concluded. “Ashley Madison employees did a pretty decent job making their millions of women’s accounts look alive. They left the data in these inactive accounts visible to men, showing nicknames, pictures, sexy comments. But when it came to data that was only visible on to company admins, they got sloppy.”