My gender, let them (not) show you it

[desperance]

I think I may have done this before, but I put this LJ through Gender Analyzer - and it's 79% sure I'm a woman. Is this because I talk about cooking and cats?

Apparently (by poll data) they're right 55% of the time. I have to say, I don't think a 55/45 split is good enough, on something where sheer guesswork gives you 50/50...

Comments

[jimhines.livejournal.com]

I'm 75% woman, apparently.

Given a sample size of about 1000, I'd say that 55% might have smoe statistical significance, but it's also a pretty darn weak result.

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

It's only 57% sure I'm female, so perhaps the computing and other science geekery offsets most of my general sissiness.

And now they're only right 54% of the time, possibly converging on 50% as their data set gets big enough for random fluctuations to peter out.

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Last week I was pretty gender neutral, but they guessed female. Today I'm 84% woman.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Now that's weird, that you could change so radically so fast. They must only look at the very latest entries, I'm guessing? Which could never be enough to make a fair assessment...

[lamentables.livejournal.com]

Because I should be working, I've just been testing it with the url for individual entries on my lj. I only selected entries where I'd written something, and they all came out 97-100% female. An entry with just a photo and no text cannot be processed. This is not looking convincing to me.

[jeremy-m.livejournal.com]

It seems to be a general tool rather than an LJ-aware add-on, so if you give it an LJ journal URL it probably sees the last 20 entries, minus anything behind cuts, plus the assorted adverts and other noise LJ adds to your words.

So the bias towards almost everyone being a woman could be as simple as having words like "home", "communities" and "help" at the top of each page :-)

[swisstone.livejournal.com]

They're 99% sure I'm a woman.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Wow. Not just wrong but emphatically, determinedly wrong. That's impressive...

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

They were 100% certain I was. That's a higher score than Ann's blog produced.

[ziactrice.livejournal.com]

Actually, shouldn't sheer guesswork give you 51/49?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I don't know: should it? Statistics not my thing, to be honest...

[ziactrice.livejournal.com]

Well, global average on-birth it would, but also you can adjust by country and age-range. I suspect not many newborns are posting entries to Livejournal, so getting a normalized sampling of them would be problematic.

I was just having a bit of fun, thinking that even just the female-birth advantage made their tolerance smaller, thus their accuracy even more suspect.

I'm not a statistician, but every once in a while my nodding acquaintance with the subject is enough to make me raise eyebrows at certain things published in the papers...

[handworn.livejournal.com]

They came up with the same result for me, though not that high-- only about 57%, as I recall. And I'm neither a woman nor gay.

Right 55% of the time is not too impressive.

[tanngrisnir.livejournal.com]

It says, We have strong indicators that [tanngrisnir] is written by a woman (96%).

Hmm.

[mizkit.livejournal.com]

I'm a guy. :) 53% likely. :)

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

It might be right - I've not had a chance to examine your purported girly bits, so am relying on chefted. And he's never, in my hearing, explicitly stated your gender.

But at least it's fairly ambivalent. It's 86% sure I'm a bearded lady.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I think they do look at only the most recent entries. It guessed me as 99% woman. But when I looked at the past dozen entries, I could see why.

[ellarien]

It had me as 60% male. This may be partly because my more feminine-specific entries tend to be f-locked; on the other hand, I do work in a rather male-dominated environment and, skirts and long hair to the contrary, have never been terribly girly.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I have a feeling I was 79% certain to be a woman last time I tried this; today I'm down to 54%.

[samarcand.livejournal.com]

I'm 97% woman which, obviously, I'm quite happy with. Although I haven't written anything especially girly on LJ recently.

Interestingly, a page on my site dealing specifically with crossdressing and clothes and girly stuff came up with 50% male.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Haha, I'm 92% sure I'm a woman. I wonder what's up with that 8%? Did I mention cars a lot or something?

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm fairly convinced you're a woman, if that helped.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Oh shut up, you have first-hand evidence, I've stayed at your home. Chaz might've been fooled, you know!

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Oh shut up, you have first-hand evidence

Pardon? Did Ann know?

I've stayed at your home

Oh, ah, yes, I remember it well.

(http://www.flickr.com/photos/ghostwords/2059806121/)

Chaz might've been fooled, you know!

Dang. Sorry about that.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

In which the scales fall suddenly from my eyes...

I love that photo.

[mevennen.livejournal.com]

I am about 99% girly, so no confusion there. And here was I thinking that mention of the chainsaw would throw it off track.

Never mind - most AIs are the former but not the latter.

[abserdman.livejournal.com]

It's 91% sure that I'm a woman. Which is quite nice considering I am.

[alexmc.livejournal.com]

Hmmm

We think http://alexmc.livejournal.com is written by a man (61%).