Gender Confusion

Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, one online source has declared with 99% confidence that I, your humble blogger, am a female.

Mike (not to be confused with this Mike), at his advertising/technology blog Mike On Ads, has adapted a piece of javascript to analyze all of the websites in a web browser's history to determine one's gender (just in case you required assistance for such a determination). To try it for yourself, click here.

Once you request a review of your browsing history, you will find a list of all the websites you've visited with a corresponding male-to-female ratio for each site. Any website with a male-to-female ratio of less than 1 is more heavily visited by females. Likewise, a greater-than-1 male-to-female ratio value indicates web traffic skewed toward male viewers for a particular website. A score of 1 means the website attracts the same amount of men and women. A magical formula accommodates all of the ratio values of your visited websites and assigns you a gender.

I had my own preconceptions with respect to my gender identity, but ever curious, I wanted to know what the webgenies had to say. Below is a list of the sites in my browser's history and their corresponding gender ratios. I have ranked my viewed sites from most female (my newly assigned gender) to most male (my formerly presumed gender).

Website & Male-to-Female Ratio
abc.com 0.47
bet.com 0.54
crateandbarrel.com 0.56
snapfish.com 0.57
cbs.com 0.6
barackobama.com 0.68
amctheatres.com 0.69
americanheart.org 0.71
nature.org 0.75
whitepages.com 0.75
nationalcity.com 0.79
netflix.com 0.79
cafepress.com 0.8
sixflags.com 0.82
att.com 0.83
facebook.com 0.83
mapquest.com 0.83
progressive.com 0.83
statefarm.com 0.83
yale.edu 0.85
bankofamerica.com 0.9
business.com 0.92
fox.com 0.92
msn.com 0.92
youtube.com 1
sciencemag.org 1.04
blogger.com 1.06
imdb.com 1.06
weather.com 1.08
ebay.com 1.11
flickr.com 1.15
honda.com 1.2
johnmccain.com 1.27
mlb.com 1.33
cnn.com 1.35
pepboys.com 1.67

There are some interesting observations to be made from the data in this list. For one, it is way manlier to support John McCain than Barack Obama (compare johnmmcain.com's male-to-female score of 1.27 barackobama.com's, 0.68). So, all you dudes out there who want to stay dudely, you know who to vote for (or at least whose website to frequent)... dudes who hope to get in touch with their feminine sides might consider the Obama ticket this November.

It may come as no surprise to many readers that MapQuest is found among the ranks of female-dominated websites (0.83), while the more masculine among the webisphere are perhaps inclined to trust their noses in their navigational pursuits. Likewise, chicks (I hope you will not find "chicks" a derogatory term--especially now that I can be found among their ranks) will consult whitepages.com (0.75) when they need to find a phone number; apparently men will just guess.

Women are far more likely to visit the websites for the television networks ABC (0.47), BET (0.54), CBS (0.6), or FOX (not Fox News) (0.92); men spend much more time than their womanly counterparts at the web pages for CNN (1.35) and The Weather Channel (1.08). Are ladies more interested in entertainment and men in information of a more political or climatic nature? It's difficult to conclude otherwise.

Youtube is the great online equalizer, devoid of gender bias; it has a score of exactly 1. Men and women are equally likely, for instance, to want to check out this great man.



Like the results from a carefully controlled DNA microarray experiment (performed in triplicate, of course), nearly unlimited quantitative and qualitative analysis can be performed on the data presented in this report, and I have just barely skimmed the surface for the wealth of information that can be derived from this list. I invite my readers to contribute their own interpretations of these provocative data.

Based on the accumulated ratios of these websites, I am, with 99% certainty, a female. Please feel free to try the site out yourself and report in the comments section to this post if you were surprised by your gender designation.