So… You Think I’m a Chick…

The Gender Genie seems to think I that I write like a female, at least.  I pasted in the contents of the most recent five entries on the site (except for this one, of course) and four of the five were analyzed as “female”.  That’s pretty interesting, if ever-so-slightly disturbing.

Personally, I’ve never really noticed a big difference in the style of writing between males and females.  Generally, the differences I see have to do with the content/subject of the writing and not how it’s written.  If there is a difference, I think females tend to write better than males and maybe that’s why my writing is analyzed the way it is: I think I generally write pretty well.

Note: I ran the above text through the Gender Genie as well and it claims the above is written by a guy.  Go figure.

Posted Thursday August 21, 2003 in Around the Internet by Chris Curtis

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Comments

OMG what a retarded algorithm.  Did you go to the NY Times article that described it?  It is basically assuming that males like to use the word “the” a lot, and hardly ever use the word “with” as well as not using possessive pronouns.

That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, and as you proved, isn’t even consisent between writings of an individual author.

Sounds on par for something the NYT would report as “news” though.

By Derek Jones on August 21, 2003 at 02:19pm link

The nature.com article reveals in greater detail, sorry that I missed that one first.  It’s even stupider.

By Derek Jones on August 21, 2003 at 02:21pm link

And this is the best part!!

So this article would already, through sentences such as this, have probably betrayed its author as male: there is a prevalence of plural pronouns (they, them), indicating the male tendency to categorize rather than personalize.

Gender Genie reports his article as female.

By Derek Jones on August 21, 2003 at 02:22pm link

I ran all sorts of text through and I found it to be roughly 80% accurate to the gender. The wierd thing is that my friend Eric kept coming out female, no matter how I ran his writing through.
Oh yeah, I also ran THE BIBLE through and found the word of God to be “male”. The research is all on the blog if anyone’s interested…

By Rex Stetson on August 22, 2003 at 08:44am link

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