Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Gender Confusion

In the coffee room yesterday Jenny, Matt, and I took a test to determine whether we were male or female. It was in a book left there, the translated title of which is "Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Park." I know, right? Hard to believe these things are published. However, the test did correctly predict that Jenny and I are female and Matt is male if, and this is an important if, we used the scoring suggestions in the book. You see, they had different rules for tallying the scores of men and women. If we all used the male rules then I moved to the man category and Jenny was in some ambiguous middle region.

And then today, Bitch Ph.D. posted a link to a website that can determine your gender based on your browsing history. Fascinating huh?

Here's how it breaks down for me:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 55%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 45%

SiteMale-Female Ratio
blogger.com
1.06
nytimes.com
1.13
foodnetwork.com
0.63
wachovia.com
0.87
npr.org
0.98
theonion.com
1.2
gatech.edu
1.06

So the fact that I blog means I'm slightly more likely to be a man. And as a NY Times and Onion reader I'm pretty manly. But checking my bank account online and looking around for recipes allows them to correctly identify me as a woman.

And since I do actually work at work, I should point out that the Georgia Tech website was used to access web of science. FSU has much more limited choices.

If you use google give it a try. I'm interested to know how well it works.

1 comment:

Reforming Soccer Mom said...

I'm not sure how I feel about this

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 42%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 58%


Site Male-Female Ratio
craigslist.org
1.13
facebook.com
0.83
blogger.com
1.06
bankofamerica.com
0.9
nytimes.com
1.13
drudgereport.com
2.08
sprint.com
0.77
walgreens.com
0.64
cabelas.com
1.25
ajc.com
1.02
theonion.com
1.2
emory.edu
0.89