As a privately held company, Pinterest doesn’t have to share user growth figures with shareholders. That means we don’t know exactly how many Pinners there are on the popular social bookmarking network.

But we do know that women make up a large majority of users, perhaps as many at 80%, as a RJMetrics study found in May. It’s one of those truisms that has the advantage of being true.

Pinterest doesn’t deny it, but wants to make the case that it’s more than just a one-trick social network. Tonight at the San Francisco headquarters, Pinterest’s head of engineering Michael Lopp shared some demographic figures in a session with journalists before a Pinterest engineering community event. We weren’t at the meeting, but a Pinterest spokesperson shared some new stats from Loop’s presentation:

Pinterest has doubled the number of male active users in the past year.

men make up one-third of all new Pinterest sign-ups, and that the growth rate for men is higher than for women.

more men use Pinterest in the United State than read Sports Illustrated and GQ combined

there is a 50-50 split among men and women users in emerging markets like India, Korea and Japan

The majority of Loop’s talk focused on improvements the company has made on its search product, Guided Search, and other details about how the network processes the more than 120,000 requests it receives every second. For more about those figures, see my colleague Greg Sterling’s Search Engine Land post: Pinterest Evolving Into A Personalized Search Substitute.