The score was closer to the men’s rating more than 48 percent of the time and closer to the women’s rating less than 9 percent of the time, meaning that when there was disagreement, the male preference won out about 85 percent of the time. men and women rated a movie differently by 0.2 points or more, on average - the overall score overwhelmingly broke closer to the men’s rating than the women’s rating. But when there was bigger disagreement - i.e. In 17 percent of cases, the weighted average of the male and female voters was equal, and in another 26 percent of cases, the votes of the men and women were within 0.1 points of one another. Looking strictly at IMDb’s weighted average - IMDb adjusts the raw ratings it gets “in order to eliminate and reduce attempts at vote stuffing,” but it does not disclose how - the male skew of raters has a pretty significant effect. And in 513 cases (12 percent), the men outnumbered the women by at least 10-to-1. In 2,212 cases (51 percent), men outnumbered women more than 5-to-1. In 3,942 cases (90 percent of all eligible films), the men outnumbered the women by at least 2-to-1. The other 4,280 films were mostly rated by men, and it wasn’t even close for all but a few films. Of those movies, only 97 had more ratings from women than men. A film needs 25,000 ratings from regular IMDb voters to qualify for the list. We’ll start with every film that’s eligible for IMDb’s Top 250 list. OK, but how skeptical should we be? To figure that out, I wanted to see how strong the male skew of raters is on IMDb and how big an effect that skew has on movies’ scores. “And what we need to do rather than be seduced by the number is to subject it to meaningful inquiry as to how it was obtained.” “If you see any number that is a rating number or a number with a percentage sign, it may be compelling or meaningful and it may not be,” said Gary Langer, the president of Langer Research Associates, the polling firm that has long conducted surveys for ABC News. But on the internet, and on ratings sites, they’re a much smaller percentage. and Canada in 2016, according to the most recent annual study by the Motion Picture Association of America. Women accounted for 52 percent of moviegoers in the U.S. Even the vaunted IMDb Top 250 - nominally the best-liked films ever - is worth taking with 250 grains of salt. The Academy Awards rightly get criticized for reflecting the preferences of a small, unrepresentative sample of the population, but online ratings have the same problem. It’s a worthwhile question, and lately it’s made it pretty hard for us to take the ratings provided on IMDb, the largest and most popular movie site on the internet, at face value. So why aren’t we more skeptical of movie ratings that do the same thing?