Because statistics and demographics are interesting :)

The article asks a similar question: The researchers do not attempt to explain these differences. However, they show once again that ‘dated’ gender stereotypes don’t always match with reality. And when they have little explanatory value, one can question whether gender is even relevant in a piracy context.

Since gender studies is an academic field and students do be writing theses, these things will pop up every once in a while, without any specific ideological reason.

Most likely, some statistics/gender studies student/postdoc wanted to take a look into the data and this is what came out at the other end.

There was a study I read not too long ago that found the pre-movie anti piracy warning actually acted sort of reverse psychology on men, causing them to actually pirate more (as opposed to women). There have definitely been some gender-correlations in certain studies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology

As someone that has issues with some of the woke crap going around, I have to wonder the same. What does gender have to do with any of this?

Maybe break down by gender could be related to how accessible technology is to genders based on barriers like sexism and gender-based hostility? A bit like how IT jobs have less women (despite things like the first programmers being women and it originally being a "woman's job"), non-binary folk and tend to be male-dominated? You have to ask why something that shouldn't have a gender bias is gendered. In this instance, I would be looking at why there's a difference between Western/W.E.I.R.D. countries and Indonesia - what in Indonesia is making it more accessible to women when the reverse is true in countries known to be hostile to non-males in the technology world.

(Possibly I have way overcomplicated what I'm trying to say lol but I'm a bit sick at the moment so not easy to think through a woolly head).

My first thought too. That, and K-Pop. There are a lot of hardcore fans throughout SEA who don't have the income required to legally access all the content released by and/or featuring their favourite stars.