Saturday, October 29, 2005

Gender Genie

Can writing be intrinsically male or female? According to this site it can. Take a 500 word or better piece of writing, cut and paste it into the Gender Genie, hit the button and you'll have an instant analysis of the gender of the writer. I tried it on a few of our favorite bloggers with the following results: Rick Ballard is overwhelmingly male; Syl is female, although one post came up slightly male; Vnjagvet, Contrary Pelican, and RogerA came up more male than female. Andrew Sullivan is overwhelmingly male. Try it on your own writing.

This brings up interesting possibilities. Are we more male some days than others? On certain subjects more than others? At different times of the day? Around different people?

(HT Catherine Johnson at KitchenTableMath)

[Oh, and for the above post the results were:
Female Score: 123
Male Score: 305
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is:
male!]

7 comments:

chuck said...

I gave it a try with a sample from The Screwfly Solution by Raccoona Sheldon, aka James Tiptree Junior, aka Alice Sheldon, nee Alice Bradley. Her writing got her classified as male:

Female Score: 249
Male Score: 348

Thus continues a long tradition of gender speculation that would probably have amused her.

flenser said...

Well now, is this ever something interesting.

Heh.

flenser said...

"But actually, since I think about it a little more, maybe not."

The above sentence is 100% female. The one in my prior comment was 100% male.



From the explanation at the site -

"In particular, we find significant differences between
male- and female-authored documents in the use of pronouns and certain types of noun
modifiers: although the total number of nominals used by male and female authors is virtually
identical, females use many more pronouns and males use many more noun specifiers. More
generally , it is found that even in formal writing, female writing exhibits greater usage of
features identified by previous researchers as "involved" while male writing exhibits greater
usage of features which have been identified as "informational"."

Syl said...

More involved than informational, that's me!

Glad to know I am what I am.

vnjagvet said...

Interesting. I guess living solely with females this past 38 years has not tainted my masculine "voice".

ambisinistral said...

After the fiasco of the Generals test, which pegged me as being a brain-dead coward, I was a little hesitant to take another. No need for me to see a doctor, I turned out to be a male after all.

Female Score: 238
Male Score: 708
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Rick Ballard said...

It's not as if I haven't tried to allow my feminine side to appear. It's just that when it does it immediately crawls into a corner, whimpering and sobbing. No amount of flogging will bring it to its feet, so I've given up on it.