I have no idea how often I am wrong. Even in cases where people tell me what gender they are I have no way of knowing whether it’s the truth.
Nor do I care particularly. The one thing I can tell for sure is that people guessing my gender on the net have been wrong slightly more often than they’ve been right.
I am pretty confident that my success rate is right around 50%.
Actually, I have seen people write those very things when discussing suicide in the abstract, but not when discussing an individual person who has committed suicide. In the latter case, both genders are usually sympathetic toward the family and don’t say anything callous.
I think it usually comes up when you use he and you’re corrected to she, or vice versa. Occasionally it comes up when you meet the person in real life after knowing them online.
I have no idea how accurate my own guessing is because, like you, in most circumstances I don’t care about the person’s gender. I also use he/she or they more often than just assuming a gender. However, I am almost always mistaken for male online (even with signs that I’m female, like a picture of a woman as my avatar) so people do get it wrong a lot and I may well be among them without realising.
I can see the reasoning behind the cowardice/selfishness dichotomy. Men are told to be strong, women are told to be nurturing; men are criticised more for being weak, women are criticised more for not being nurturing. That’s a broad brush of course but it’s certainly true for many aspects of life. What I can’t say is true is whether people judge suicide in that way because I’ve almost solely seen people express their condolences or regret rather than being judgmental.
Once upon a time, I wrote a computer program that could guess gender from username with over a 90% accuracy. That was mostly based on letter frequency, especially in the final letter. Double letters are also surprisingly indicative.
To me, there is no gender on the internet. The only way I can see a gender is if someone purposely tells me their gender.
I would be so bad at guessing that I don’t make a guess unless something obvious clues me in.
Mostly this although I wouldn’t say “strong indication”. More like “some indication”.
One thing I do see is I get it wrong more often for non-USA people than I do for USA people. Which really tells me that what I have is a “stereotypical USA female” template and a “stereotypical USA male template”. When reading I hold the character I think I detect behind the post up to those two templates and see which matches best. The non-USA factors present in non-USA people fuzz up the match some. Which results in a larger error rate.
If you have any doubt about the gender of a poster, simply read any of the threads on “battle of the sexes” topics. Divorce, childrearing, sexual politics, abortion, etc. On these issues people show their group allegiance much more clearly than in threads about gardening or pets or DIY home repair. Or on politics on non-genderish topics.
One thing I’ve said in previous threads on more or less the OP’s question is that one of the refreshing things about the Dope is being able to converse about <whatever> without the gender of the participants being front and center. Face to face each of us is always wearing our team t-shirt. And once an online person’s gender is well-known to you the team t-shirt is always a little bit present. It’s that before time when you don’t know whether AnonymousPoster is male or female and in fact it doesn’t much matter that’s sorta magical. And just like with real magic, shedding just a little light on the topic ruins the effect.