Science Tells Me This Blog Is 83% Masculine
Posted by Alan Childress
According to an algorithm used by the site GenderAnalyzer, this blog is likely written by a man or men, to the level of 83% certainty. I plugged in our URL and that is what they say. We are 83% manly. That’s not so shocking, though as always we welcome the guest comments and posts of women — and proudly feature the occasional post by contributing editor Nancy Rapoport of UNLV. But lest you think that Nancy’s contributions cut 17% from our total masculinity, please note that her solo blog rates her in a way that’d threaten Mike, Jeff, Bill, and myself if we were not so damn secure; as to Nancy’s blog, the analyzer says: “We think http://nancyrapoport.blogspot.com/ is written by a man (86%).”
That makes Nancy 3% manlier than us. Worse: if you consider that her manliness contributed to our overall score of 83%, that might mean that our actual masculinity, controlling for the variable
“Nancy,” is closer to 79%. OK, we are a little threatened now. Plus Nancy may not be entirely pleased to know that [robots think that] she writes like a stereotypical male. I just wish she knew how to express her emotions more openly. Oh well, maybe she should buy some Chantix.
For your information, the WonL blog by a former GW student and now-DC-lawyer (a woman), gets this assessment: “We guess http://wonl.blogspot.com/ is written by a woman (54%), however it’s quite gender neutral.” And Legal Ethics Forum gets a manscore of 81%; I am guessing that Andy Perlman’s posts drag the score way down.
Carolyn Elefant’s fine solo blog MyShingle rates a score of 88% man. This despite the fact that her second most recent post is about Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House On The_Prairie. Makes me wonder about the science behind this trusty analyzer. If she commented on The Terminator movies or Bad Boys 2 would she have scored a “99.9% guy”? Only allusions to The English Patient and The Notebook could dip her below 75%?
Fearless Leader Paul Caron at TaxProf is plenty male: 92%! Michael Froomkin at Discourse.net is exactly as male as us, 83%; and he has a seriously interesting post on a teen’s webcam suicide event in Florida. Web-watchers egged the teen on, till he died. Peer pressure is awful, I think worse than when we were kids.
There is also an analyzer of personality type, at this other Swedish scientific site, using Myers-Briggs. Our blog rates us as The Thinker type, “especialy attuned to difficult creative and intellectual challenges and always look for something more complex to dig into.” (Who sculpted The Balding Thinker? That would be … Rogain.) Paul Caron is “the duty fulfiller” type. A tax prof as a “responsible and hardworking type…especially attuned to the details of life”??? Hmm, shocking.
Hats Tip to Minor Wisdom and the Legal Writing Prof Blog.