mindstalk | gendered masking (Reply)

On Bluesky a few days ago, some NYC people said that blacks were the demographic most masking these days. This surprised me, as I would have guessed Asians, from my own observations and vague memories of polls. Thing is, I feel gut level observations are pretty junk statistics, whether mine or someone else's, especially for anything complicated.

Like, I'm pretty confident I see more Asians masked than blacks masked, but I'm also fairly confident that I see more Asians period, given where I am. Gauging the proportions masked? Yeah, I don't really trust my gut sense, without doing an actual tally.

Friday I was in downtown SF, and looking at masks, and it was still Asian, South Asian, white. But again, I wasn't seeing many black people right around Union Square, either.

But I did notice the masking was very gendered, and started keeping a tally in my head. Given a somewhat arbitrary standard of "wearing any mask, anywhere around the head, outside", (thus excluding one guy who tore his mask off on leaving a medical building), what's their apparent gender? Indoor masking is frankly more relevant than outdoor, but I wasn't going indoors, so.

Final result: 43 female, 28 male, 8 I couldn't even make a guess.

Thing is, it was clumpy. When I started, I was at 7-0-0. But my walk took me into the Tenderloin, and the male count shot up. But is that because variance was evening out, because men in the Tenderloin were more likely to mask, or because people hanging outside in the Tenderloin are more likely to be male? I think it's the third one, honestly.

(And part of the 7-0-0 were hotel workers on strike, who might be more likely to be female to begin with.)

Likewise, crossing Market and walking along Mission, with lots of homeless people on the sidewalk, boosted male some more. But when I cut back to Market, the female number went up again.

So you see my number isn't all that useful. Without a guarantee that I was seeing people in general who were evenly male or female, I would have needed to be tallying "men/women seen, men/women masked". But that was too much numbers for my unassisted memory.

I reset my tally when I entered BART, figuring that being enclosed would change behavior, and it started out 0-4-0 -- 4 men in a row, all masked! Of various races, too! Final figure was 8-10-0. But I suspect that's small sample size variance -- and again, I wasn't tracking the base rates of men and women.

Walking around downtown, I again had the gut feeling that older Asian women were the demographic with the highest proportion of masking, but again I can't really compare to say the proportion of black women. I don't think black men were that high, but then lots of them were apparently homeless, and probably not wasting scarce oney on outdoor masks even if they wanted to.

Final conclusion... none really, except that I maybe wasted my time on a tally too weak to be useful. Though hey, I had a nice walk. Better would be to take notes on paper or phone, or do a mental tally of "women seen, women masked" and men later, if I think I can't reliably track four numbers in my head. If I wanted to do race as well... I'd probably need the paper.