Why is that on the internet, people assume you're a male from America, but if you're a vegan on the internet, people assume you're female?

Demographics. It may not be the case anymore but in the early days of the internet it was a majority American males. That trope has stuck around.

And statistically, vegans are roughly twice as likely to be women.

That's easy. Real men only eat meat. If you don't, your either a female or a soyboy. That's why my diet is 80% meat and 20% cheese - my anal cavity may be more plugged up than a bear mid-hibernation, and I may die of a coronary before I'm 40 years old, but at least I can say I died a fucking man. An alpha male if you will. Now excuse me, I've got a 2lb steak and half a Gouda wheel to to eat so that I can take my 3 hour shit before going to bed. No body said that being a real manly man was easy.

Wait, eat meat AND die soon?
That's what we call a win-win.
You dropped the: /s
Ron Swanson has a much better way of phrasing it, hahaha
From Parks and Recreation.
Seriously though, get yourself some psyllium husks and take like quadruple the recommended amount. The fact you put a plant product into your body will be vastly outweighed by the absolutely enormous manly shit you take.

Because even now 2/3rds of vegans are women?

And the number used to be MUCH HIGHER.

So it's natural assumption to make.

I’m neither female nor American. Nobody will guess my identity on the internet.
- You're a dog?
- You are truly an idiot, it's right there! You are a red balloon.
- 38yr old German lady?

It's not just the Internet. I'm vegetarian and my wife isn't, but servers often assume the veg meal is hers when the food is up

its because of misogyny and ingrained belief of meat=masculine
Yeah, no, I get the same when I order the fish and she orders a steak, when I order an ale and she orders a stout. Apparently not manly enough
- Since you've made the distinction, what's an ale for you?
  In America, at least when I worked in the industry, stout was part of the larger category of "ale", which compromised any and all "warm" fermenting beer styles. Basically "ale" was synonymous with "not lager" and not any specific variety.

I'd never encountered this (though I'm not a vegan) but it does seem like that the majority of vegans are women, so I can kind of see it:

https://veganfta.com/2023/02/17/is-veganism-led-by-women/#:~:text=A%20YouGov%20study%20of%202021,men%20and%2061%25%20as%20women.

and here I am struggling to find single monogamous vegan women in my area
- Time to get freaky, bud.
- maybe you live in the wrong area for your lifestyle?
- ...monogamous?

Long ago I remember an argument in favor of rule #30 "There are no girls on the internet" which I will paraphrase:

The internet gives anonymity and if you have something of value to say, it should be able to stand on its own regardless of one's weight, sex, religion, preferences, location or such. If you have to chime in that you are a girl, then you are either FBI (see rule 29) or looking for attention, but with nothing valuable to add. If you have nothing to add, then we go to rule 31 (show pics of your tits or get out).

Now, the reality is that such sentiment is sexist and ugly, but there is a general truth to the concept of an idea standing on its own merits regardless of source. Current social pressures lead to the behavior in question in that we've been somewhat conditioned to think that a) computers are for boys (this has become far less of a stereotype since smartphones became a thing), and b) veganism is unmanly/stupid (I don't understand why this still has traction, either, given Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Lewis, and a bunch of butch people are vegan).

rules of the internet (some NSFW) ::: spoiler SPOILER : 24-34 These are from an older version on archive.org:

Every repost it always a repost of a repost
Relation to the original topic decreases with every single post
Any topic can easily be turned into something totally unrelated
Always question a person's sexual prefrences without any real reason
Always question a person's gender - just incase it's really a man
In the internet all girls are men and all kids are undercover FBI agents
There are no girls on the internet
TITS or GTFO - the choice is yours
You must have pictures to prove your statements
Lurk more - it's never enough
There is porn of it, no exceptions

the list after a decade of changes :::

I assume everyone on the Internet is a dog.

Woff
- Son of Dog, House of Barktok.
Way too many jerks on the internet for it to be dogs
- Those are cats.
Everyone knows that cats rule the interwebz. That's why there are so many cat videos. Self promotion.
Then who was phone?!

Nobody here old enough to remember rules 30&31 of the Internet lol?

For the first systement, yes, there are a lot of women on the Internet nowadays. But there also are a lot of men pretending to be women, and a lot of creepy men, so I'm guessing a lot of women just don't mention it or pretend not to be one just to get some peace.

It all boils down to stereotypes, IMHO. Every time you're making such statements as "all X are Y" when talking about groups of people based on one criterion, you're stereotyping. Such broad generalizations are rarely useful outside humoristic tropes, and even then...

Ah, I looked for their text, didn't see it, so I commented. Should have replied to you, but my CTRL+F missed your post.

My guess would be that with the huge amount of American males (it is a big country after all) people just assume. And women are known to care about animals more, whether that is true or not.

I've been called a guy before and my name doesn't exactly strike people as male. I am female. I've been on the internet long enough not to care.

I'd guess the America part is that English is a kind of standard language for the most popular sites, so you'll find a lot of non-native speakers using it across the web. However, from the reader's perspective, all you know is they're speaking English, and the country with the most English speakers in the world is the USA, so it seems like there's a good chance you're American.

As for male, I'd guess it goes with the association of males being on computers more than females. At least for forums like Reddit.

I think for vegans, it's the association of women shooting for slender bodies while men shoot for bulking up. If you want to bulk up, meat is a great way to do it. Veganism is a great way to lose weight.

Because people who have never actually met a vegan before assume they're all unwashed hippie women. They're basically incapable of imagining a scenario where a man wouldn't want a steak dinner lol

Most vegan people actually want steak, but they consider that wish to be unreasonable and decide to actively go against it
Where does one find a washed hippie woman?

I don't, but the only vegan I know is a male, so I imagine him when I hear or read the word vegan. He's a pretty cool cat.

It's because when you take small sample size of "people on the internet" you'll get either completely random set of beliefs and assumptions, or you'll get beliefs and assumptions that you're prejudiced to project onto the wider sample.

I think it's cuz women care alot about their diet. Vegan diets help with weight loss

Maybe I don't know enough vegans, but none of the ones I know chose this diet (it's not just a diet I know) for weight loss..

Interesting. The couple of vegans I have known in real life have been sickly-looking young men, so that's what I envision.

And yet here you are trying your hardest

Men aged 25-45 account for something like half of all beef eaten in America. So if you’re not gonna eat meat you’re more likely to be a woman.

Easiest stereotypes to confirm? most likely that.

The politically correct bien-pensants always fail to recognize that stereotyping is a form of inductive reasoning. If you see something repeatedly, but not necessarily without fail, you form an opinion, which is layered with a degree of truth. A subset of the human race, based on ethnicity, inclination, or geography, will spring to mind after reading each of the following words: financier, migrant worker, male flight attendant, NASCAR driver, sprinter.

I'm sure most of us immediately conjured similar images. Yes, it is unfair to impose a group characteristic onto an individual, but we did so nonetheless. To belabor the obvious, each of us is an individual, not a group. When the stereotype is proven fallacious for an individual, move on.

We're not confused about why we do it. We're aware that doing it has negative outcomes.
No amount of prolix explanation excuses even the act of stereotyping.
It may be impossible to avoid stereotyping entirely which is why people practice not doing it. You call this "politically correct". I call it "behaving decently".
- No amount of prolix explanation excuses even the act of stereotyping.
  It depends on why and how you use stereotypes.
  Prejudice only properly refers to judgments formed without consideration of the available information.
  Prejudging is legitimate when we do not have all the relevant facts of an object or subject, having to resort to inductive reasoning in order to try to induce and predict its individual characteristics.
  It's all about trying to make new information about someone or something, so we can economize information.

Nah, or you're a vegan on the internet, I assume you're a religious zealot

The second epithet is rather boring, I say that as a vegan, compared to the first one: To be imagined as US-born, white, middle-class, able-bodied, suburban, slightly anxious, heterosexual, cis-male person working in an office to sustain car, house, consumer goods and vacations is just not enough to represent the fediverse's, the internet's capabilities.