Anemone Cerridwen has finished analyzing the data from her barefoot survey (and what a task it was!—there was a lot to analyze).
You can look at the results yourself here.
I’m just going to mention a few of the items that caught my eye (so they are peculiar to peculiar me).
The first thing I want to note is that 389 people responded to the survey. This is a pretty good number. There are all sorts of reasons to be wary of internet surveys (and you can be sure Anemone is aware of them), and representativeness is one of them. After all, the participants are self-selected.
But my experience is that 400 is pretty close to the number of active barefooters. Even though various groups have memberships in the thousands, if you look at it, rather few of them actually participate in the discussions, and one gets to wondering just how many joined in a fit of excitement with the whole barefooting thing and then kind of wandered off.
So anyways, as I said, 400 is probably about right and should give us some good data.
Another thing is that 25% of the respondents were female.
Breakdown by Sex
[All charts from Anemone’s survey results.]
This might actually make things a bit less representative. There was a big push to get more women to participate so those that did participate might have been drawn from a pool of less dedicated barefooters.
And we still don’t know why women are generally less represented in on-line barefooting. (Note: this is not Anemone’s fault; there’s no way a survey like this will teast that out.) Ten years ago we’d say that it’s because women were less represented on the internet as a whole, but that’s no longer true (just look at Facebook).
Heck, we’re not even sure whether women are less represented as barefooters overall.
Another thing of interest is that Anemone included minshoe wearers, too. There were a fair number of folks who really preferred minshoes to going barefoot.
Another chart I liked was the pie chart that showed how much folks were able to go barefoot.
Barefoot Time
She further analyzed that to find what kept folks from going barefoot all the time (which is pretty much where I fall), and the weather and discrimination where high up there. I was rather surprised that work wasn’t mentioned more as cutting down on barefooting time, since, back before I retired, that was the major limiter for me.
One more chart: folks were asked if they like footwear. 26% said yes. My mind went immediately to: well, yeah, we had 25% women.
Bad me.
Here’s how it was broken down by sex.
Liking Footwear
Men liked footwear more than the women did (they also didn’t like it more), but there is nothing to support the stereotype (at least among barefooters) that women like shoes a lot more than men.
Anyways, go take a look at the whole survey.
Ahcuah 
Sterotypes are funny things, on the surface they appear true, but the slightest amount of digging tends to destabilise them.
However, it is my personal experience that while both men and women often like shoes, women are the ones who tend to have dozens and dozens of pairs while men tend to have two or three they take extreme care of. Or, to put it another way, women collect shoes, men polish them. I’m not sure what the representation reason is but I have noticed that while girls tend to subscribe to barefoot meeting groups, only men tend to turn up. It may just be that girls are intimidated more by the presence of men than visa versa, or it may be that girls are less inclined to have either hobbies or non-conformist lifestyles. Or all three.
I decided last year that there were fewer women because women have a harder time going against social norms.
I was surprised by the great number of participants from the Netherlands.
400 active barefooters? What is an active barefooter? One who goes on the internet to talk about the topic? I suspect there are many more who don’t put on footwear when not absolutely necessary, but don’t make an issue of it. That is what is called “Dunkelziffer” in German: a number in the dark, we can estimate but not know it precisely. Are they in the thousands? millions?