Saturday, December 06, 2008

Is your blog written by a man or woman?

Apparently, there is a 75% chance that my blog was written by a man, according to the Gender Analyzer (Hat tip: TaxProf blog) which is a website where you put in your blog URL and it uses Artificial Intelligence to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman. It doesn't seem too accurate as it asked if it guessed my sex correctly and when I clicked on "no," it showed stats indicating that 46% of the time, the Gender Analyzer was inaccurate. That's no better than chance.

I read on another blog by a tax blogger who was female that her sex was also guessed incorrectly. I wonder if the Gender Analyzer stereotypes about what the various sexes should write about and if you do not follow suit, it messes up. This particular blogger theorized that perhaps it gets confused by gender neutral names but what part of Dr. Helen sounds like a guy? I've never met a male Helen, have you?

Anyway, you can go here for fun and put in your URL to see if it guesses your sex correctly.

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24 Comments:

Blogger Jacob said...

I put my blog address in and it predicted that it was written by a woman. Maybe its because I don't talk about beer, sex and pizza.

2:35 PM, December 06, 2008  
Blogger DADvocate said...

74% probably by a man. But, I did this a couple of weeks ago and I was barely above 50% by a man.

I wonder what the criteria is.

2:57 PM, December 06, 2008  
Blogger Jennifer Stites said...

maybe you mentioned football this week and something your daughter was doing last week. You'd think a name with DAD on it might be a hint. So much for trying to analyze commom sense.

3:43 PM, December 06, 2008  
Blogger fivewheels said...

This site seems to fare very poorly. A couple of years ago I was playing around with a similar program called The Gender Genie, and it worked much better. It correctly identified this Dr. Helen post as female.

There are links on the page that explain the methodology. If I remember correctly, it was something like, men use more definite articles, and women use more adjectives, stuff like that.

3:50 PM, December 06, 2008  
Blogger Helen said...

fivewheels,

You were right, Gender Genie got this post right but I put in two others below it and it said they were both male. Seems like there are still some kinks to work out.

3:56 PM, December 06, 2008  
Blogger Difster said...

51% Woman. Really now.. is there anything feminine about my blog?

8:44 PM, December 06, 2008  
Blogger El Duderino said...

It has my blog at 51% male and there are three guys that write it. Hmmmm. It goes on to say that we are gender neutral for the most part. Funny, I don't feel gender neutral. the other guys, kinda sorta, but me no way.

9:33 PM, December 06, 2008  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Put my blog through the analyzer and it came up 60% male.

So I submitted my wife's blog and it returned 57% female but said "...it's quite gender neutral."

My wife's blog is titled "Mom on the Run"; her About Me description reads in part "I'm a wife and mom..."; and many of her readers know her first name, so they address their comments to Karen.

Granted, writing about marathons is a gender neutral topic, but there are a bunch of clues on the site that should kick back a 100% female rating.

I'm sure this is a fun experiment for them though, so I'm happy to be a voluntary guinea pig in their algorithm improvement project.

10:32 PM, December 06, 2008  
Blogger jay c said...

Nope.

We guess http://historycarper.com/wordpress is written by a woman (56%), however it's quite gender neutral.

2:56 AM, December 07, 2008  
Blogger Slamdunk said...

i'll have to check it out--thanks. i discussed football once this week on my blog and may have reinforced my masculinity, but i could have canceled those points out with a more recent post on family blessings. yikes...

6:43 AM, December 07, 2008  
Blogger Cham said...

76% male for my blog.

8:44 AM, December 07, 2008  
Blogger Julie said...

"We think http://jigsawsthoughts.blogspot.com/ is written by a man (82%)."

okay, now I don't discuss makeup and nail varnish, but I do occasionally talk about cooking ...

1:43 AM, December 08, 2008  
Blogger javadoug said...

I used to write Artificial Inteligence programs (Expert Systems). Back then, we actually wanted them to work.

Today, it seems just about anything (and especially anything coming from government) is taking the 'artificial' to mean unintelligent. More like politically correct.

Just like we supposedly shouldn't do profiling at air ports, it seems like this program isn't assuming anything based on the blog owner's first name.

However, there is one point I want to make about this. I have an account on flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/javadoug/

A few years or so ago, I had a contact named pinkypro from Slovenia, her picture was a picture of a woman, and her profile indicated that to all intents and purposes, she was a female. S(he) had us all fooled. For a year or more we saw the most magnificent photos there all the time. Everyone seemed to think it was legitimate. Then one day someone figured out that all of the photos were stolen from other picture sites. I was completely taken aback, because the comments seemed so good. So the whole thing was just a put-up, and I'm guessing it was likely a male who posed as this female. Many of my contacts even considered leaving flickr because of this whole thing. It is amazing the capacity people have for believing, and it is almost a shame that so few have the power to cause such loss of trust, when it is likely that a large majority of people are legitimate.

9:23 AM, December 08, 2008  
Blogger javadoug said...

I have two blogs.
We think
http://mrpunkykitten.blogspot.com/
is written by a man (67%).

We think
http://javadoug.blogspot.com/
is written by a woman (70%).

The first one is on politics, and the second one is poetry and words I have written.
This is rather amusing :-)
Take a look for yourselves

9:32 AM, December 08, 2008  
Blogger Cham said...

An avatar is anything you want it to be. As long as an image isn't copyrighted, you can use it for whatever you want. So if someone takes something that is posted for general use and uses it as an avatar, they've done nothing wrong.

When the Internet first became popular back in the 90s, my friend dared me to create a username that was clearly feminine. I chose Honey2000. Honey2000 worked at a swimsuit model and enjoyed sunsets. Since no one was monitoring the Internet at the time Honey2000 was bombarded with the most obscene instant messages. Honey2000 lasted about 20 minutes.

Then I decided to be Yolanda for a bit. No matter what Yolanda said or did, posters were very very rude to her. There was a very heated discussion on one site trying to determine whether Yolanda was black or white. I stayed out of the fray. Both Honey2000 and Yolanda existed before avatars.

People visualize what they want to visualize. People often choose Internet names on how they want to be perceived rather than who they actually are and that is perfectly okay.

10:23 AM, December 08, 2008  
Blogger Soccer Dad said...

I'll have to post this later, but what part of "Dad" don't they understand?

I was mostly "gender neutral!"

12:29 PM, December 08, 2008  
Blogger Eowyn said...

63% male... Seriously, what are their criteria? Apparently one can't discuss politics without sounding like a man.

3:27 PM, December 08, 2008  
Blogger Musings from the Smartest Man in the World said...

I ran it and it said that my blog is written by a woman 56%. I'll have to do something about that.

5:08 PM, December 08, 2008  
Blogger Joanna said...

I maintain 3 blogs and ran them through that page a couple of weeks ago: #1 is a rather generic "look what I saw" kind of thing...it was judged to be 53% man; #2 is about my school's baseball team and was judged to be 68% man; and #3 is a photography blog where I post photos I take and it was judged to be 71% woman. Heh heh.

5:47 PM, December 08, 2008  
Blogger Unknown said...

There's a 62% chance that http://rachellucas.com is written by a man. Hmm.

5:52 PM, December 08, 2008  
Blogger Cappy said...

I got 72% man. I'm so angry at them for rating me less than Dr. Helen I'm going to scratch their eyes out!

9:24 PM, December 08, 2008  
Blogger Norman Lathers said...

I just ran mine and and got something similar to what Eric mentions above. My firt name (Norman) is right at the very beginning (in what I think blogspot calls the 'title bar'). But supposedly I'm a woman. Maybe the stupid thing just reads the first 5 letters of the blog!

9:07 PM, December 13, 2008  
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