Women are confusing, men are simple

[andrewducker]

Yesterday I posted a link to the page which tried to use your browser history to work out if you were male or female.

Today I found myself discussing the vagaries of research into female sexuality with marrog.

Strangely, these two things seem somehow linked together in my mind, along with the results of some of Simon Baron-Cohen's research into systemising/empathising functions in brains, and the male/female split therein. I exchanged an email or two with him after his research was covered in some newspapers, pointing out that while men did, statistically, seem to have a tendency to be focussed systemisers, lacking in empathy, women tended not towards empathy, but towards balance between the two functions. The papers were, of course, reporting it much more one-sidedly than that.

This linked into the poll yesterday, where it's obvious that the (very basic) algorithm can tell that a man is a man 2/3 of the time - but is no better at telling that a woman is a woman than a coin toss would be. Which would, again, tend to indicate that men are more likely lean over in one direction, making them easy to spot, while women are spread all over the place.

This tends to be picked up by reporters as "Men tend to be X, and women don't." and then reported as "Men are X, women are the opposite of X.", which is clearly nonsense.

(This then tends to be interpreted by a large chunk of people as "_all_ Men are X, _all_ Women are Y", which is beyond nonsense and into gibberish.)

Comments

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

it's obvious that the (very basic) algorithm can tell that a man is a man 2/3 of the time - but is no better at telling that a woman is a woman than a coin toss would be.

Well, not for your friends list. But since you're a man who tested as one, is it surprising that your online friends also visit male-categorised websites?

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

I agree.

Andy - I'm not entirely sure you should infer too much about the reliability and validity of that tests based on the sample from your friends group.

Also, there are lots of problems with the actual test. It looks what what sites you've visited, but it can't actually tell what you were doing there.

Its interesting to look at trends, but I would be careful to applying to the wider world.

[andrewducker]

I wasn't - I was linking it to other things I'd seen (such as Simon Baron-Cohen's research), and to other stuff I've seen on research before.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

Heh good, my research sense was tingling ;)

[andrewducker]

Only if you assume that my friends go to the same websites as me. Which, as I spend most of my day on either Slashdot, The Register, Microsoft.com or other tech sites, and I'm fairly sure that at least 80% of my friends page doesn't, seems unlikely.

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

Well, no, only if you assume there's better-than-chance odds that your friends have similar tastes to you. They don't have to be the same sites, only sites in the same "gender category", and given the non-random nature of friendship, I'd say it has to skew the results in a way that provides at least as good an explanation for your results than assuming that the test always works that way.

[andrewducker]

Aaah, so it's skewing everyone on my friends list in a male direction? Which would mean that if it wasn't doing so then it'd be worse at predicting men, but better at predicting women?

[cangetmad.livejournal.com]

I don't think you can make that presumption from the data. Possibly only your female friends tend more male-typed, while your male friends are typical; possibly it skews everyone more male; possibly the test is a bit bollocks.

[andrewducker]

Well, it's clearly at least a _bit_ bollocks. It is, after all, just going from stats on what genders tend to use what sites, and thus open to all sorts of inconsistencies.

[terminalmalaise.livejournal.com]

Agree, I was coming here to point out the same possibility.

Also, it might have been interesting to have a better idea of how wrong the guesses were, since the results themselves gave an actual percentage likelihood. If, for example, the test were 100% certain on every correct guess, but only 51% certain on the wrong ones, the results suddenly might not look so bad.

[darkoshi]

But you do tend to post links to interesting pages you find, and the people on your friends list would be somewhat likely to click on those links.
Plus, the script doesn't analyze how often you go to certain sites, from what I can tell, which would be an important piece of data, but rather just that you've been to a site recently (however long it takes for a link to change from "visited" to "unvisited").

[darkoshi]

I'm baffled actually, about how my result came out so strongly female. .. especially since I click a lot of the links you post.
My results included a long list of websites, with both high and low and mid-range numbers.... too much for me to calculate in my mind. I guess their calculation must be correct, but it seems odd.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

This tends to be picked up by reporters as "Men tend to be X, and women don't." and then reported as "Men are X, women are the opposite of X.", which is clearly nonsense.

This is one of the things that particularly infuriates me with any kind of research misreported.

[meaningrequired.livejournal.com]

While we're on the topic of association...

I was thinking about X and Y chromosomes. Now, this is something I know absolutely nothing about, but I was wondering what effect the Y chromosome might have on "Men tend to be X, and women don't."

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

You can pretty uncontroversially say that "Men tend to have a Y chromosome, women tend not to" but you can't get a huge amount more categorical than that without running in to a lot of very complex stuff, and that's just on the genetics, before you hit phenotype or anything so ill-defined as behaviour.

[zz]

girls smell. girls do *skipping*.

wait, that's systemising isn't it? :D

[d-c-m.livejournal.com]

Yes! Thank you for writing down something I have been thinking for a long time!!!

[0olong.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure you can possibly draw any conclusions about men and women in general from those stats. Surely if the researchers had found the same they'd simply have shifted the results a bit in the female direction, so that they'd identify 50% of randomly-gendered people as female, and I think that would inevitably lead to exactly the same inaccuracy in male-detection as in female-detection, as long as we're assuming those are the only two possible results.

I think it's much more like 'maleness' and 'answering Andy's poll' are both positively correlated with something that for want of a better name I'll just call 'geekiness'...