by Shani O. Hilton
A couple of people pushed back on yesterday's post on Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton to assert that women care about babies and weddings, which is why people ask women about them. sethblink wrote:
[B]lame the media or society or the sexism of men all you want for the presence of questions like this on shows that proport to be about news, but the real reason anybody ever asks these questions on TV is that by and large, women viewers find this stuff interesting.
Incidentally, today I checked out Google's ad preferences, which has determined, based on the sites I visit, that I am a man. It's an algorithm, which is science! So, assertion proven, right?
Except, here's the thing that's weird: Despite the fact that more than half of my searches are related to arts and entertainment, celebrity news, womens apparel, and beauty/fitness (all of which are CLEARLY LADY CATEGORIES) Google still says, "Based on the websites you've visited, we think you're interested in topics that mostly interest men."
I'm not sure what to make of this. Is it that the law/government/politics sites I visit are more heavily weighted than the Ryan Gosling-heavy tumblrs? Is it that rock music is "male"? Would I have to visit baby naming websites to get categorized as having female interests?