Finding out the gender of visitors

[Raymond]

Is there a good way to find out % of gender of visitors? I thought about it and I was going to make a layer that floats on top of my front page that just simply ask if they are male or female. But I tend to believe that female tends to be more willing to fill out surveys like this, and it will ultimately skew the survey results.

Anyone has experience in this?

[stapel]

Raymond said:

...I tend to believe that female tends to be more willing to fill out surveys like this....

I don't like pop-ups and other intrusive cr@p anyway, and I usually find surveys to be annoying, especially if filling out a survey is not why I went to the site.

If I went to some site and, for no readily apparent reason, a box popped up wanting to know if I were a boy or a girl, I'd leave immediately.

FYI: I'm female.

Eliz.

[anand84]

why dont u include it in your signup form if u had one..

[Rosalind]

There's no good way, because people will be unwilling to answer that question honestly. Even if you offer an incentive, you can't be sure that it won't attract more of one sex than the other, skewing the results still further. Inventing alter-egos for yourself is half the fun of this sort of web survey, anyway.

The best way to reliably identify someone's gender is through credit card information. At least then you'll get to know the gender of those people you manage to sell something to.

[topsites]

Put up a porn page, the percentage of traffic that visits said page is your site's approximate male population. :-)

If your host (or yourself) has an issue with nudity, bathing suit ladies work just dandy.

[etechsupport]

Mens are from google and women are from yahoo, see if you can from which search engine they are landing on your site.

[percentages]

Females are much more willing to buy and provide leads than males for a non-gender specific website.

There is no way of measuring the % of visitors by gender, but, who cares? I'm only interested in the % of buyers, and that for me is about 70% to 30% in favor of the female market, even though my product is totally non-gender specific.

I conclude that women surf more, and buy more in the general market.

Therefore if you have a non-gender specific product you will do better by appealing to the female population more!

[abbeyvet]

Mens are from google and women are from yahoo

Is that backed up by anything or is it your gut feeling?

[LifeinAsia]

[qoute]The best way to reliably identify someone's gender is through credit card information. At least then you'll get to know the gender of those people you manage to sell something to.[/quote]
Um, how would you classify a name like Pat Smith? Or how about someone whose family comes from Japan, Korea, China, or any other country whose gender-specific names (if any) may not be apparent to you?

[john_k]

Um, how would you classify a name like Pat Smith?

LOL! Remember the Saturday Night Live skits where they tried to figure out if Pat was a man or woman?

[Aircut]

offer custom background color of your website

man are less likely to choose pink

[onlineleben]

Mens are from google and women are from yahoo

I get very low traffic from Y! (unfortunately). Most of my subscribers come from other SEs. And most of my subscribers are women.
SE preference I think is not only gender related, but also to the branding of the SEs in different countries.

If you run a newsletter, why not offer a customization page for them so your subscribers can enter their name, how theiy want to be addressed (Mr, Mrs, Dear ... etc).
I have this on my site and most fill it out without me askeing them to do this. Please note that this information is not in mandatory fields.

[etechsupport]

abbeyvet, I have read about that in webpro news recently. It is really interesting stuff.

[Hobbs]

Is there a good way to find out % of gender of visitors?

yeah, exactly what you did (although not sure about the floating part, too many bad stuff float)
I did the same (no floating) and got over 5000 participants in each of my 12 quesstions, now I have FULL demog data on my visitors, and no time to make any sense or conclusion from it!
moral: keep it simple and plan ahead what you want to do with it.