There are three major factors shaping the AskHistorians community of flairs/unflaired answerers (to which I say!): academic history, popular history, and reddit. As a result, AH doesn't completely reflect any one of the three, but you can see the influence of all of them.

• reddit is 15% female. In 2006, 34% of tenured history faculty in the USA and 43% of graduate students were women. (There are significant institutional factors [PDF warning] in academia that make women less likely to earn tenure.) AskHistorians' userbase, according to last year's census, is 15% female.

• In terms of flair subject area, AskHistorians has the most listed flairs in European history, followed by American and military. Latin America, Africa, Pacific, Middle East and Asia lag far behind. In addition, we have flairs in non-geographic fields: art history, archaeology, history of science, and history of thought. Several points to make here:

1. The popularity of military history reflects our "history buff" or popular history roots rather than our academic ones. Straight-up military history is an existing but very small branch of formal academic study.

2. The AH breakdown of fields does not quite mirror academia's. Academic history departments work very strongly by geography first of all, with some attention to era. While you can find history of science (etc) graduate programs, generally professors teach in the geographic subfield of the history department. Additionally, ancient and medieval European historians would typically be halfway-Europeanists, halfway-ancient&medieval.

3. When you split out the ancient and medieval historians from the list and add in the historians from the non-geographic fields (leaving aside the people from related disciplines like archaeo and art history--we love you, though!): the result probably reflects, geography-wise, academic history. America first (in America, at least), with Europe a very close second. Latin America, Near East, Asia-Pacific, and Africa kind of duke it out for the remaining spots.

4. Within medieval, the AH flairbase is extremely powerful in the early Middle Ages and Byzantium. At least in America, the field of academic medieval history is much more dominated by the post-1000 period in the west. This is actually very exciting: the last 10 years saw a sweep of new "big narratives" of the early Middle Ages. Clearly they are not only inspiring people to take up the 'Dark Ages' again, but students are finding more and more there! Growing attention to archaeology and material culture is also helping focus attention on this period that is 'darker' in terms of textual evidence but has far more to tell us hiding in the dirt. No one but me cares about point 4 so I'll stop now. :)

5. Despite being reddit, we have very few flairs in history of science. Even medical questions usually fall to other flairs with peripheral knowledge.

• In terms of experience, there is no single answer. According to the census, the biggest group of flairs are in-progress history graduate students, but "completed history degree," undergraduate major, and other-background but significant interest and reading experience are not that far behind.

• In terms of questions, the questions fielded at AH involve military history, daily life, and "what was it like to..." must more frequently than academic historians. Scholarly history tends to focus on people or sources much more heavily: what does text P tell us about medieval popular religion. My favorite example of this is /u/Binjadu asking, "How did people in 12th century Scandinavia survive winter?" The answer to that question came from articles on an archaeological excavation of a Viking overwinter camp, and a book chapter on the economic integration of Scandinavia, Russia, and the Holy Roman Empire in the later Middle Ages. That second one is not the way questions come up here. The same data serves what really are two different ways of thinking about the past and how we relate to it. (Never change, AH! This is exactly what I'm here!)

• By way of "viewpoint" or methodology, AH does a pretty good job reflecting the current norms of academic history. If you follow the Monday Methods series, you will see that even flairs who don't appear to use a specific theoretical approach or work on a topic--f.e. me posting on disability studies--are aware of the ongoing conversations, and strive to pursue our own research and write our answers with that broader discussion in mind. This makes sense given our balance of current graduate students, current undergraduates far enough into their degrees to have an area of specialization in which to be flaired, and people who deal with historians somehow in their careers. All of these people need to know WHAT historians are talking about, and HOW they are talking about those topics.

I hope this helps a little!

Hiya,

Some of this can be answered via our last subreddit census. It's a year old now but shouldn't be drastically different than now: 325K Census Results and the State of the Subreddit. I suspect you'd be most interested in the section The Flairs, which talks about the demographic of the flaired users (as opposed to subscribers/readers).

As for "do we attract a certain type of historian", I can't answer that personally, but you can see how the flaired users have been categorized, and which categories have more or less people in the List of Flaired Users

Admittedly I've not been subscribed for very long, but I'm somewhat surprised at the lack of historians of history itself (historiographers) on the board... when I were a lad/lass it was all the rage!