Gender Genie: Do you write like a male or a female?

[Typhoid_Mary]

Anyone heard of Gender Genie? You paste in a section of text and it tries to detect whether the author is male or female.

Seems to work better with longer sections; it got most of my ultra-condensed stories wrong, but all of the longer pieces right.

http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.html

[HawkLord]

Now this is interesting. For the piece I had in P-X I was actually writing from the perspective of a mother, and sure enough when I inputted the text the algorithm thought it was written by a female. Of course, in reality it was not written by a female but I found it very interesting and I think I have some idea of how it may work. The female score was 8285 whereas the male score was 6862.
When I tried out my latest story, which is a shorter work of only about 1100 words and written from the perspective of a male character, it was correct although there was not much difference in the male and female scores (they was only a few hundred points difference between the two).
I also tested it with a non-fiction essay I wrote about the moon and it was also correct.
Finally, I checked the above writing and it came out as male.
Most interesting!

[Typhoid_Mary]

That suggests that you can write convincingly from a female viewpoint. Having read your piece in PX, I'd say that was true.

[A_Non_Ymous]

Interesting algorithm. I tested it with some passages from "Lurker at the Baker Street Threshold" and it guessed correctly.

LSN

[DeeCrowSeer]

Well, the latest Nutmeg story came out as:

Female Score: 9327
Male Score: 8216

Which I'll take as a compliment since the lead character was female, and some of it is from her perspective.

[MissDreamy]

Chapter four came out as female, but very, very close between the two results. Does this mean I'm a unisex writer? :)

[Etive]

I just tried this and only one out of the four pieces I submitted returned female, the others were strongly male.

I guess I'll have to write more ladylike in future. :roll:

[PsychicWarVeteran]

I used about 1200 words of a story I'm currently working on, told from a female point of view. The result said the author was male (correct) but it was a very close call. So it was right about my gender but also detected the female aspect (the story's point of view). Fascinating.

The premise by which the algorithm makes its decision seems simplistic ("above" is a male word and "we" is a female one? Really?), but it was rather accurate so who am I to criticize?

[S_Ombre]

...my writing must be very masculine...

I put the prologue to a long piece that I've been working on and it gave me a female score of 476 and a male score of 2344... but I'm a girl...

S. Ombre

[A_Non_Ymous]

The algorithm is flawed, S. Ombre.

I picked out several different chunks of prose written for different occasions / reasons. On these random samples, the algorithm was not especially accurate. It's a bit simplistic.

Ton kilomأ©trage rأ©el peut varier.

LSN

[S_Ombre]

Oh well....

The piece I put in was about a male character.

S. Ombre

[spaced_moorcock]

I've just given this a go with a couple of pieces of my prose and factual work. Both came out as being distinctly male. It might be a bit simplistic but it worked for me.

A female friend of mine commented upon my over-use of the word 'harsh' when talking about negative things. She said it was a typical boy thing to do. An interesting theory. There could be something to it.

[PsychicWarVeteran]

A female friend of mine commented upon my over-use of the word 'harsh' when talking about negative things. She said it was a typical boy thing to do.

When I was younger, I described everything I liked as "rad." I noticed girls hardly ever used that term. So, yeah, there might be distinctly male words. Come to think of it, have you ever heard a woman use the word "cans" or "jugs" to describe their own chest? I bet not. :P Not that I'd use those terms in that regard, but you see what I mean.

[Etive]

Actually I use the word 'jugs', I'd better get off this thread before I grow a beard!

[PsychicWarVeteran]

Actually I use the word 'jugs', I'd better get off this thread before I grow a beard!

You're too cool Etive! So, are those your "stems" depicted in your avatar? :lol: