Does blogging about politics make you masculine?


Or did a bunch of men decide that only men could possibly blog some keywords?

Interesting post over at MyDD about the accuracy of Gender Analyzer, a site that purports to analyze blog content and be able to tell if the blogger is male or female.

DesMoinesDem tests out a number of political blogs written by women, all of which are guessed to be by men instead. A strong case seems to be made that this creators of this tool have rather sexist foundational principles: one only writes about politics etc. if one is a man, and one only writes about shoes and shopping if one is a woman.

I tried to test two politically-oriented blogs written by women : my own personal blog, which they could not seem to parse because the URL is a big long sub-domain off the generic mac.com domain, and the Santa Clara County Democratic Party blog, which I used to write for. Even after I could no longer keep up blogging for them they replace me with another woman.

And guess what? The Gender Analyzer was 90% sure the SCCDP blog was indeed written by a woman.

Hmmm.

So clearly it's not quite so simple that political content=male.

I agree with DesMoinesDem: I'd love to see an analysis about whether men and women political bloggers blog differently...different sentence structure, different vocabulary, different linking style...the works.

Posted: Sun - November 23, 2008 at 11:40 AM       EmailFeedback

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