Do you write as male or female?

[ts_curious]

The Gender Genie (http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php) website claims to be able to identify people's genders from how they write. It has identified correctly most of the people I have tried it with - I'm intrigued to know how accurate its results are for people here.

It needs more than 500 words of text ideally to get an accurate result.

http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php

Post your results for it & whether or not it was correct.

I got:

Female Score: 1974
Male Score: 5924

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

[Alyssa87]

Words: 761

(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 1379
Male Score: 858

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

http://bookblog.net/gender/female1.gif

[Alyssa87]

shouldnt there be 1 more option?
I am m2f transgendered & was identified as female

oooor should i vote "(no) I am male & was identified as female''- which i guess technically applies.lol

[ts_curious]

shouldnt there be 1 more option?
I am m2f transgendered & was identified as female

oooor should i vote "(no) I am male & was identified as female''- which i guess technically applies.lol

Oops. I did add that to the list. I'm certain I did... Maybe there is a limit to the number of options in a poll or something? It doesn't let me go back & edit it now though.

[BrendaQG]

My score varies by the subject matter. Most of what I have tested that I write on HA scores female. Most of what I write on my science blog scores male. What I write in articles on wikipedia scores male, what I write on discussion pages scores female.

I am with what the guardian's Alex Chancellor said about this. "...Rubbish..." (according to it all of the Guardians female columnist are in fact male. :-/ )

Fail.

On the other hand since I am a transsexual perhaps it's confusing response to samples of my writing means it works just fine. :shrug

[ts_curious]

On the other hand since I am a transsexual perhaps it's confusing response to samples of my writing means it works just fine. :shrug

This was what I was wondering when I posted it here.

[SarahG]

My score varies by the subject matter. Most of what I have tested that I write on HA scores female. Most of what I write on my science blog scores male. Much of what I write here scores female. What I write in articles on wikipedia scores male, what I write on discussion pages scores female.

I am with what the guardian's Alex Chancellor said about this. "...Rubbish..." (according to it all of the Guardians female columnist are in fact male. :-/ )

Fail.

On the other hand since I am a transsexual perhaps it's confusing response to samples of my writing means it works just fine. :shrug

Probably because the test isn't well made.

If you look at what it searches for, and counts, it does look for gendered words (she, her, etc). So if you're writing about your female boss, it is going to have a higher count of she and her than something about social political theory.

Those words can be helpful for what the test is doing, but not if they're strictly being counted (I am not sure why his and he is not on the male side, if she and her is on the female side of the tables). Very few guys will in their writing have a hypothetical where the illustration is a female.

I.e. "...if a student were to __, she'd be best off to __"

vs male- "...if a student were to ___, he'd be better off doing ___"

or neutral "...if a student were to ___, then the student would be better off doing __" or "...if a student were to ___, then he or she would be better of doing ___"

I've had professors warn their students about using phrases like that with those gender clues if it doesn't match the gender of your name because it can confuse people, or worse make people think that a section of the paper was plagiarized from someone else. Some professors don't bring this up, but instead instruct not to use he or she like that thinking that all papers need to be thoroughly gender neutral for political correctness (that's where the "he or she would be better off doing ___" comes in).

I put in a bunch of clippings from nonfiction I've done over the years, and when I am writing nonfiction for school I was getting almost a 50/50 balance, but a hair higher on the female side. I don't have any fiction to try, since I haven't writing anything fictional since whenever my last k-12 english class required me to do so which is too far back for me to have handy.

Like Brenda if I pasted in forum postings they came back being overwhelmingly female, which surprised me when using postings that were persuasive from a philosophical, historical, or political perspective. I expected that to come back more closely balanced like academic works, but it seemed higher and no differently higher from forum postings about meaningless stuff.

There are other ways I've seen tests like this do the calculations to try to gender writers. Time is used. If I have an appointment on Friday, cancel it and make a new one for the next Wednesday, someone may say "The appointment has been moved [forward or back]" Girls usually view chronology like a book so the female answer is "forward" ("back" would be used if the date were going in the opposite direction).

[BeardedOne]

Interesting...

Based on a couple of blog entries (I haven't done many):

Words: 1466
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 1909
Male Score: 1821

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!



Words: 779
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 996
Male Score: 891

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!


In fairness, I also got about the same number of Male scores, but on significantly shorter entries. Apparently, when I get especially wordy, my girlie side comes out to chat.
:shrug

[Falrune]

I posted a fiction piece.

Words: 695
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 714
Male Score: 885
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

[SarahG]

Hamilton's Federalist 84 came back as male.

Words: 4203
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 4131
Male Score: 7066

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!