Ok, ladies: Would you rather out yourself as a woman online, or spend the night in the woods with a bear?

You don't try and attract a specific demographic. You just create the space you want and if they also value that space you they will choose to participate. It's not 2005 there are women on the internet everywhere. Lemmy has a lot of women compared to reddit and mastodon has a decent women userbase as well it feels.

Hexbear is a bad representation of lemmy ignore their demographic polls.

As for actionable steps I think we are doing a good enough job already. The communities here are not toxic. The users are mature and call out sexist stuff when it happens. The only thing we could probably do is host more content that women typically tend to enjoy but that will come with growth of the site and is better done organically.

I think I would swap all usage of "Lemmy" for "Hexbear" in the OP as that instance is not an accurate representation of the whole of Lemmy. Perhaps choosing one of the general Lemmy instances would give a more accurate representation.

Here’s the problem. This is the internet.

These are locally run and often volunteer based instances.

Anyone can spawn any amount of accounts and run their instance however they’d like, giving lots of trolls neat little nooks to hide in.

You’re expecting to get real results? How did you account for multiple votes? How are you even sure that the data from the polls if unique, is accurate?

Garbage in. Garbage out. People will use Lemmy if they want to. End of story. Idk why everyone is so obsessed with inflating user counts

This is an extremely delicate subject - it should be our goal for everyone to feel welcome in Lemmy and seeing a low sample of cis women on the platform might indicate that women are feeling unwelcome here. That tracks with general experience of mixed gender internet spaces where women will experience increased harrassment (and might actually poison a survey since one defensive reaction is to just deny that you're a woman).

This is slightly complicated by the fact that we're not drawing from the general human population, Lemmy's user base trends strongly to the technically literate (which is a gender biased population for terrible reasons outside of Lemmy specifically) which may account for part of the result. The result may also be impacted by the fact that technical fields have traditionally been more accepting (not fully accepting or anything - but less awful) when it comes to LGBT+ folks - so we're likely going to see a higher than normal presence of trans folks as a result.

Additionally, Lemmy is a style of forum that is extremely similar to Reddit and so it's likely that people who had negative experiences over there are extremely hesitant to try Lemmy - Reddit is quite infamous for hosting openly misogynistic community, promoting misogynistic views, spawning IRL misogynistic movements and allowing a lot of toxicity in DMs towards women in particular. It's likely that Reddit has just burned a lot of women off ever considering a forum like thus.

Lastly, I'd hope we can avoid specifically trying to increase one demographics engagement on the platform, I think there's a distinction between making sure everyone feels welcome and trying to attract a specific demographic - while that distinction may not feel significant to some people it, at least, makes the difference between being good and being cringey to me.

What's the weird thing with open source community's fixation on sex or gender identity?

Just be a cool space with cool conversations.