We were pretty surprised when we picked up humor tabloid The Onion at our local coffeeshop this week and saw this above-the-fold headline, 'Plan To Get Laid at DragonCon 2001 Fails,' accompanied by a picture of the purported subject of the story at DragonCon.  The article relates the sad tale of one 27-year-old 'Garry Melcher' and his attempt to find love at DragonCon, but 'unfortunately, not one of the convention's 20,000-plus attendees was willing to copulate with Melcher at any point during the four days of the event.'  Our surprise wasn't due to the topic of the story, which sounded all too real; it was at the fact that The Onion's editors thought that it would resonate with enough people to justify putting it at the top of the front page.  

 

We take that as our cue to relate our observations about women at conventions this summer, and what that might tell us about the changing audience for pop culture products.  We attended the three largest pop culture consumer shows in the country this summer -- San Diego Comic-Con International, Wizard World (Chicago), and GenCon (Milwaukee).  While we didn't do any formal counts of people on the floor by sex, we came away with definite impressions about the gender mix, confirmed by conversations with other attendees. 

 

Of the three shows, San Diego had the highest percentage of women.  While the show isn't 50% women yet, it's heading in that direction, which what felt like a solid 25-30% of the attendees being females.  Furthermore, there were attending females there on their own account, not just with a significant other.  Wizard World had a smaller number of females, and it appeared that the female attendees were primarily girlfriends or spouses of male attendees.  GenCon had a similar percentage of women to Wizard World, but with more of the female attendees there on their own.  The San Diego trend has been a steady progression over the 20+ years we've been attending the show.  We also note that San Diego has the longest tradition of a varied selection of categories on the dealer's floor, and is in the part of the country that typically leads pop culture trends.

 

Our basic conclusion is that women are a growing part of the attendees at pop culture shows, and that the fact that the trend is most pronounced at San Diego indicates that there's a corellation between a broader range of merchandise and a higher female percentage in the audience.  Also, the fact that females are a growing part of the audience in California bodes well for the rest of the country; most trends move West to East.  Who knows, maybe someday a story like The Onion 's will have a happy ending.