On line forms have one be male by default September 15, 2009

When I recently had to fill in (yet another) form on line in order to register for something, I was struck by a curious thing that wasn’t present with its paper predecessors.
In the predigital age, you had paper forms with all those empty boxes to fill in, first name, last name, address, date of birth, gender, etc.
But with digitalised forms, there are other options of presenting, and gender is often presented with radio buttons for male or female or with a drop down box for Mr, Mrs or Ms (different discussion on that).
The awkward thing is that with on line forms, there generally is a default selection, and as far as I have seen, the default selection is male.
With the drop down box it is a matter of alphabetical sorting, I suppose, but in the case of the radio buttons having male be the default is just odd.
It seems that technology has imposed yet another bias.
I like to think that I just ran into a bad set of samples. Has anyone encountered electronic forms with no default gender?