Introduction
For a while now I have been frustrated at the lack of posts from the other men at this site. In December, it prompted me to pen a poem, wherein I wrote,
Are we really a witless and dull-headed bunch?
Can't our gender together write one fourth as much?
What I wrote is what I’m hoping for, that eventually there will be one work posted by a man for every four posted by women. I realize that in some activities and professions, there is a natural gender gap, and perhaps writing is one of them. So I do not expect the ratio to be even; yet I should think that a four-to-one ratio is quite reasonable.
I was dissatisfied. The current ratio, I knew, was far from four to every one. But what was it, really? Ten? Twenty? I looked back in the archives for all of the year 2009, and found my last guess was not far off.

Statistical results
Here are the results, month by month:
Month........Total...Women.....Men
January..........74..........68..........6
February........75..........72..........3
March............87..........85..........2
April..............92..........90..........2
May.............115.........108.........7
June...............81..........77..........4
July................69..........66..........3
August...........59..........55..........4
September......67..........65..........2
October..........58..........54..........4
November......42..........34..........8
December.......32..........29..........3
Total.............851........803........48

Out of 851 posts, 48 were written by men. Twelve men, that is, as follows:
I am Nate-Dude....14
James....................10
Ezra.........................7
Taylor.....................4
Timothy..................3
Arthur.....................2
Stephan...................2
Ian...........................2
Joseph.....................1
Nat..........................1
Gary........................1
Shane.......................1
The prize for posting goes to Nathaniel, otherwise known as Nate-Dude. He’s the only man who averaged more than one post a month, and he’s not even a monthly writer. Congradulations, Nathaniel.

What to do about the ratio
The ratio over the past year was 803 to 48, or about 16.73 for every 1. Conversely, that’s about 0.06 posts written by a man for every post written by a woman. That’s about 24\% of the idealistic four-to-one goal.
Is a goal like this even attainable? What is the ratio of female to male users on Apricotpie? I did not have the time to spend to find out – and the results would probably not be a reliable indication, as there are a lot of “users” who no longer use Apricotpie – and if I eliminated everyone who hasn’t posted in over a year from the results, well… that’s more time than I’m willing to spend.
So, back to the question: is a goal like this even attainable? Consider this: the average number of total posts per month for 2009 is about 70, and posts by women about 67. Since Ben implemented some posting reforms in June, the actual number is probably closer to 60. To achieve our goal, we men need only to collectively average 15 posts a month. In 2009 we averaged exactly four posts a month. If I increase my posting to twice a month, and two other guys do the same, this would put us around 7 or 8 posts a month – twice as good as now, but still only half of what we need. In other words, if we men want to make a decent showing, we must make a joint effort. Not even three of us can carry the burden alone.

Category breakdown by gender
The only method I knew to count the total number of posts over the past year was to look under the three different categories of essays, poetry, and fiction. As a result, I started off with statistics already separated into the three categories. This provided an opportunity to obtain some interesting data; if I could have found a list of all the posts put together, I would never have bothered to separate them into categories. Evidently, men and women tend to have different preferences for the kinds of things they write.

Men (48)
Essays (15)..._________31\%
Poetry (20)..._____________42\%
Fiction (13)...________27\%

Women (803)
Essays (110)...____14\%
Poetry (268)...__________33\%
Fiction (425)...________________53\%

Although men seem to prefer writing poetry the most and fiction the least, it is fairly well divided. However, the women at Apricotpie seem to overwhelmingly prefer writing fiction, and invest a proportionately tiny amount of energy into writing essays. These are, of course, generalizations, since there could easily be as much difference between two women or two men in their writing preferences as between the two groups at large. It is nonetheless interesting. As a man looking at the statistics, though, it prompts me to ask the question: why? Why so much fiction, and so few essays? (Perhaps the women here will ask why so many essays and so little fiction?)

A Final Thought
I originally compiled statistics for posting over the past year to prove my point: that posting by men is woefully lacking at Apricotpie. And I did prove my point; yet I did not realize how interesting the study would prove. Besides gender posting preferences, there are many other things that could be studied: how the time of the year affects posting frequency, differences between posting habits of monthly and non-monthly writers, age gap preferences (assuming AP reports the age correctly), and even the historical trends of a nearly ten-year-old Apricotpie itself.