Ashley Madison may have had as few as 12,000 real women

The hack of Ashley Madison's parent company revealed as many as 95 percent of the website's members were male. A brief look at the profile information reveals the site had around 31 million male and 5.5 million female members, immediately illustrating the chances of scoring a date were fairly low for the male members of the site due to the high ratio of men to women.

However, deeper analysis of the leaked data reveals there were most likely far less women on the site than anyone dared to guess. TechSpot writes the data dump reveals many of the female accounts were obviously fake (with e-mail addresses like 100@ashleymadison.com, 200@ashleymadison.com, 300@ashleymadison and so on) and the IP address data revealed over 68,000 female profiles were created locally within the company.

The real kicker however is just how little female activity there was on the site. As little as 1,492 women had ever checked their messages on Ashley Madison at least once, versus over 20 million men, and that a mere 2,400 women had ever used the site's built-in chat feature, versus over 11 million for the male users.

It is of course hard to draw conclusions from this data about how many female accounts were genuine, but Gizmodo suggests the real figure was problably just over 12,000.

All things considered, the publication came to the conclusion that there may have been just over 12,000 actual female members that had used the site. Even if that figure is off by a few thousand (or even a few hundred thousand), it suggests that tens of millions of paying men – no matter how immoral their intentions – signed up for a service to meet women that simply didn’t exist.