Pages

Monday, April 23, 2007

The Gender Genie Thinks I'm a Dude

Via Do you Blog Like a Girl?, comes the Gender Genie, which is supposed to predict the gender of an author.

I ran several of my posts through; here are my results:

So, despite the fact that almost all of these were wrong, apparently the algorithm is pretty accurate.

Interestingly, I took a nice long post from Daddy Dialectic: peein like a boy, or the follies of fathering in which the author talks about being a father. The results: "Female Score: 2014, Male Score: 1903 - The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!"

Which leads me to wonder if my voice would be more "female" if I wrote more about personal relationships and less about politics and social issues? If so, that means the "out of the home" topics are still largely the purvey of men, while "in the home" topics are womens' topics. Or is "serious" writing considered to be male? Or do I feel the need to take on a "male" writing style when discussing serious topics? Is there really such a thing as a female or male voice, or are we simply so programmed to communicate differently? Are these different linguistic styles simply a clear demonstration of patriarchy? Are women relational communicators due to our subordinate position in the hierarchy? In which case, does my "male" voice indicate I'm not writing submissively? Or is it because women are still the primary caregivers - then of course we'd communicate more relationally?

Or is this tool just bunk?

Try it out yourself. Choose posts that are longer than 500 words, and that quote the least from other sources, so as to ensure your own style comes through. Let me know if it is accurate.

7 comments:

Polly Jones said...

Very interesting - I'm going to try tonight.

Anonymous said...

I'm at work and so can't mess around with it too much, but i ran 5-6 entries through it, one was deemed to be written by a female (which i am) the others were apparently written by a guy. I write a lot about stuff like equalization - maybe including numbers in the post confused it or something...

TomCat said...

I tried it and it said I'm I guy. RJ, I still think you're cute, even if it does misidentify you. ;-)

Jayney said...

Yup, each and every one of the posts I ran were presumed to be male-written! What a strange and useless tool :)

Anonymous said...

I ran a long blog post and an article I wrote for a club newsletter through it, and they both came out as male. Then I ran a memo I wrote for work, and it came out as female.

People on message boards always assume I'm a dude, but I usually figure it's because I like hockey..

mirth said...

I haven't tried the tool thing (which does sound like bunk), but I wanted to say how much I liked reading this post and the answer to your questions are, to one degree or another, Yes.

Red Jenny said...

bah! gender essentialism makes this dude annoyed. anyways, i thought it was kind of interesting.