Don't Mess With Taxes

One of the biggest shopping days of the year is almost over and once again, I wasn't part of the madness. That's just one of the ways I defy female stereotypes.

In addition to hating shopping, I find dressing up a major pain. I haven't worn heels in a decade and on most days nary a drop of makeup touches my face.

Then there's my love of almost all sports, choosing watching on TV or attending those events over most other activities any day of the year.

And, of course, the clincher is my decidedly tiny maternal instinct.

I've often joked that this is the first life I've lived as a woman as a way to explain my antipathy toward girly-girlishness.

AI gender assessment issues: And now It seems there's a software program has some difficulties with "typical" gender categorization, too.

In his "Macho Macho Tax Blogs" item on Tax Updates for Roth & Company, P.C., my tax-blogging colleague Joe Kristan writes:

"So just how manly is tax blogging? So manly that it brings out the testosterone even on the distaff side, if the Genderanalyzer.com website is to be believed."

Joe ran a few tax blog URLs by GenderAnalyzer, which uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to determine if a homepage is written by a man or woman. The results as of Nov. 24? Don't Mess With Taxes was 93 percent manly!

That day, the program must have caught me and the ol' blog at a particularly masculine time. Its analysis a few minutes ago was, "We think http://dontmesswithtaxes.typepad.com/ is written by a man (61%)." That's 32 percentage points closer to my gender than Joe's test four days earlier, but it still keeps me on the male side of the gender assumption scale.

Maybe the site's Nov. 26 note about "new training data" ("We are now using 4000 blogs for training data!") had something to do with it finding me a little less mannish today.

Or maybe it saw my Thanksgiving day reference to the hubby. Still, I guess my post about the Mets was enough to affect the analysis in a more manly way.

Gender tax blog confusion: I'm not alone. As Joe notes, several tax blogs written by women all were deemed written by men. They include the bloggings of  B. Janell Grenier at BenefitsBlog, Linda Beale at ataxingmatter, Roni Deutch at The Tax Lady Blog and the taxgirl herself, Kelly Phillips Erb.

As Joe notes, Kelly's name is not gender specific. Roni also could possibly, though not likely, be misconstrued. Maybe the initial before Janell threw the program off a bit.

And there are some male Kays, most famously Sir Kay of Arthurian Legend and swing era star Kay Kyser.

Still, "new training data" notwithstanding, the GenderAnalyzer needs a bit more work.

Of course, as the site notes, it was created out of curiosity and fun. So no umbrage was or should be taken by a mistaken male or female characterization.

Be sure to check out Joe's post about manly tax blogging to see how he and some male tax bloggers fared under GenderAnalyzer scrutiny. The bottom line: It's still apparently very much a man's tax world, at least when it comes to determining who writes tax blogs.

And definitely run your own URL through the program to see just who the AI program thinks you are. You might be quite surprised.