It's a magical world

Here from rec in a friend's journal: I can say pretty definitely that there has been no authoritative demographic work done on fandom (pre-internet or post-internet), zip, nada, nothing. I do fan scholarship, and that's one of the big hairy problem elephants in the room (even the surveys done by the hard copy famous big name old sf mags are dubious for multiple reasons -- i.e. they might measure subscribers, but not everybody who read on a subscription like I did on my father's). So, no, anybody who says anything about the demographics of any part of fandom (of which there are many) is pontificating without evidence.