Should I be flattered or creeped out? My comments on the recent flareup of the blogger gender wars spurred the gang at Gene Expression to analyze my blogroll for gender bias. I'd thought about doing this myself a while back but geez, you know, I've got an awfully long blogroll, and I update it roughly weekly, and it was more work than I really wanted to do, so it's very nice of them to do it for me. And then they've gone and broken it down by my categories and presented the raw numbers and the percentages and so forth…you know, it really is verging on the obsessive and maybe I should be creeped out.

Anyway, the final tally is that of the 267 sites that were over there to the right on my blogroll, 58% are by men, 21% by women, and 21% "other" (group weblogs and unknown genders). They've got the complete breakdown, blog by blog, on their site (I don't know how good their analysis is, though—they didn't notice that my daughter is female, and have scored Eva's site and Skeptic Sneath as male or neither, to mention a few odd ones I noticed, which all appear to err on the side of masculinity. That damned gender bias is everywhere).

They seem to think my 58% male number is bad news, and that it somehow invalidates my comments, but I'm not sure why—I missed the part where I claimed to be a paragon of gender parity. Yes, the gender ratio could be improved; I'm working on it, and like I say, I tweak the thing practically every week. I also don't have much to which to compare these results. As long as Razib was checking out the authorship of those 267 sites (I'm impressed, I really am), it might have also been good to count up the sexes on some other site's blogroll. Like, say, Gene Expression's (boy, would I have been embarrassed if my blogroll was more sexist than theirs. There's a project for 'em. I won't complain if they take a few days to pack it with more women before counting, even.). Or a random feminist's site, like Feministe's. While I'm sure my blogroll can and will be improved, those numbers in isolation don't quite tell me how bad I am. Am I worse than Kevin Drum or Matt Yglesias?

But really, the bottom line isn't whether someone is free of all biases, since none of us are, but whether one is willing to work to correct those biases. I am. I encourage any blogger, man or woman alike, to send me links to their sites if they think I'd enjoy them—preferably to an rss/xml/atom file, since I build my blogroll from my newsreader's opml file—and if I find it informative or entertaining, I'll add it to the list.

Sorry, gnxp, I've already checked your weblog out, and didn't find it that interesting. Keep working on it! If you want to send me a self-addressed, stamped envelope, though, I will send you an autographed photo.