I'm probably the eight millionth person to link to this, but the Gender Genie promises to predict your gender based on a writing sample with 70% accuracy.
It reached the rather less impressive 33% accuracy with me -- 2 blog samples identified as overwhelmingly male, 1 email correspondence identified as barely female -- before I got bored with it and gave up.
I was a bit disappointed to learn that it doesn't actually examine writing style in terms of sentence structure and so forth. Just counts words that are likely to be used by men and words that are likely to be used by women. According to its algorithm, pronouns indicate a female author, while the word "the" indicates a male author. Because, like, us girls are afraid of descriptive nouns? We feel safer gossiping and talking about our feelings, you know? And declarative sentences make us uneasy?
Someone needs to invent an emoticon for rolling one's eyes so hard they roll back into one's head. Because that's what I'm doing right now.
(thanks, I think, to Supergee for the link.)
5 Comments
yeah, gender genie thinks i'm a guy, too, for the most part. i decided to see if there was any difference over time, comparing blog entries from teh beginning of the year to ones made yesterday. no diff; it thought i was a guy on all but one.
I'm not surprised it thinks you write like a guy. Because you write clearly, with facts and information. Which apparently is a "male" characteristic? Sheesh. I'm almost surprised that, in the one instance where Gender Genie correctly guessed I was female, it didn't come back with little hearts and circles dotting the i's in my writing sample.
My final comment about Gender Genie: I tried yesterday's blog entry, with a lengthy paragraph about false eyelashes and liquid eyeliner. The verdict? Male author. Ha!
sarah, maybe you're really a drag queen!
I think if I were a drag queen, I'd be much better at putting on makeup!