American Woman - gender analysis of Romney / Obama Twitter fans

Estimating gender, be it online or in real life, can be a hazardous matter with significant impact should one err.  Just ask my female friends Nick and Joe, or my male friends Michelle and Evelyn. Still, we can have fun trying. I humoured myself by working out that the majority of women behind Women 4 Shariah were, in fact, men earlier this week and thought I'd take the opportunity to have a glance at the US elections.

For this I selected Women for Romney Ryan (650 followers) and Women for Obama 2012 (2,228 followers).

I'd like to start by admiring Women for Romney Ryan's pluck. When they heard of my intentions they responded with:

@geoffsshortsSure go ahead.....;-)
— Women 4 Romney/Ryan (@WomenforRR) October 26, 2012

and seem like a good-natured bunch.

On to the figures. I can only guess gender for folk who provide a first name. SuperWoman 2.0 seems to be voting Obama, for example, but it's not a first name my script recognises so it will show up as unknown. Similarly, guessing the gender of the Romney Ryan fan "Saving California" is beyond the capabilities of my script. To save you some effort with calculators I'll be showing stats once with the unknown tally included, and once without.

Women for Romney Ryan

 

Women for Obama 2012

 

So in summary @Women_For_Obama has 3.4 times the number of followers, and less than half the percentage of male followers of @WomenForRR.


Naturally, the same methodology and script was used for both accounts.

I will not inflict my political views on you - if you are voting in the American elections a politically ill-read Irishman should probably not be your first port of call. Whichever way you lean though I do encourage you to vote: it can make a difference.

I'll leave you with word clouds made from the Twitter biographies of the followers of each group. There are no prizes for guessing which is which.

If you're a blogger and want to use any of these images feel free. Do tweet me a link - I'm @GeoffsShorts.