Member-only story
Being a White Man in Your 30s (Preferably a Doctor) With a Rock Star Name Is the Key to Success
Sad ways to get your stories to reach over 30,000 claps (it has nothing to do with Medium)

Okay, I’m potentially opening up a can of worms here, but I’ll try to remain objective while putting a grin on your face.
I recently shared an article featuring some of the most popular all-time articles on Medium. When you look at the top 50 from that list (those with over 30,000 claps), there’s an ugly truth staring right at you: where are the women?
Ugh… I know, it’s not a pretty sight.
The data was collected about a month ago, scouring through the top tag’s top 5–10 writers (avoiding duplicates). Top tags are those with a top writers page, like these:
- https://medium.com/tag/self-improvement/top-writers
- https://medium.com/tag/writing/top-writers
- https://medium.com/tag/productivity/top-writers
Missing from the list are popular writers like Kris Gage or Brianna Wiest (just to name a couple), simply because at the time of collecting the data, they weren’t on top of those lists.
Top tags like politics
and news
were also omitted from the list because of outliers like umair haque.
The top 50 articles from the list were 100 percent male... Yup, 100 percent! They came from 12 male writers. Here’s the breakdown of how many articles with over 30,000 claps each of them had:

So, how do you get articles to reach over 30,000 claps?
Here are very ugly ways to make it happen:
1. Be a man
That’s the obvious one. Looking at the data, it’s the only pattern that works 100 percent of the time.