Author # Gender Votes as Male Votes as Female
--------------------------------------------
# 1 Female 4 11
# 2 Female 10 4
# 3 Female 7 7
# 4 Female 3 12
# 5 Male 5 9
# 6 Male 5 9
# 7 Male 9 5
# 8 Female 14 1
# 9 Female 6 8
# 10 Female 5 8
# 11 Female 7 8
# 12 Female 2 11
# 13 Female 10 5
# 14 Female 5 10
# 15 Female 8 7
# 16 Male 6 8
# 17 Female 10 1
# 18 Female 5 6
[This message has been edited by mikemunsil (edited March 08, 2005).]
If I am calculating it correctly, it really averages out to 49.11% accuracy. In the realm of a coin toss.
Did any voter do better than any others? Maybe there are some who have a gift in this area...
Yes, as we figured it was a bit of a crapshoot. However, there were 2 female writers (#8 and #17) whose submittals were clearly considered to be male by a significant majority of the voters, and 1 female writer (#12)whose submittal was considered to be clearly female by a significant majority of the voters. None of the male writers were clearly considered to be either male or female by a signficantly large majority of the voters.
My submittal was #6 and it was considered to be written by a female by the majority of the voters, but not at what I would considfer to be a significant majority.
Of the remaining, unless I made a mistake, all 6 had the votes match the gender of the POV character, not necessarily the writer. One was mine (#5): the POV character was a "she" and I'm a "he." I think this is natural. If we're immersed in a viewpoint, we naturally associate the gender of that viewpoint with the piece.
#8 was STRONGLY voted as male (incorrectly), and in it, we had an encounter between a male POV character and a woman who turned out to be a technological re-creation of a woman. Good job, #8!
I guess I should do some work today, so I won't analyze the other 8, but this is my conclusion so far.
thanks for organising that. I found it interesting, especially from a personal point of view as I was #12.
R
My sample had close to a 50-50 split.
Does that mean I write gender neutral?
or
Does it mean that I failed to write in a genuinely male POV?
Very interesting. Thanks for coordinating it mike.
[This message has been edited by NewsBys (edited March 08, 2005).]
--Mel
That is all. I am done.
Dude, I just realized that I failed to read/rate the last two clips.
I think this study shows that women are more interested in studying this sort of thing than guys. Except mike. Of the 15 I rated, I got 7 wrong, so I stink pretty much.
I was also the LONE and ONLY CORRECT vote for #8! Thank you. Thank you.
And I scored 61% correct guesses (because that's what they were for the most part.)
So who WAS # 8. Reveal thyself, oh masculine one! 
As for judging the gender, I looked at style and subject matter. I also looked at how believable the POV seemed to be.
My guesses turned out to be so wrong I don't even want to mention them.
One of the pluses is that I realized I'm doing better with POV than I thought.
Oh, and I agree with Mary. There were some great snippets in there. The ones that particularly appealed to me at this moment in my life were #7, #9 (I'm in the mood for something romantic, I guess), #10, #15 and #16.
I am a data-hound. Put some data in front of me and I will shake every last little bit of meaning out of it, whether it means anything or not! LOL
mm
Mike, thanks for this. It has been fun to see the results. I only got about 40% correct. I suck at 'guessing'.
I also looked at subject matter and style. I think it might have been more difficult with just 13 lines. Kind of hard to get a feel without really seeing the flow of the story. I still enjoyed it thought.
Oh yeah, mine was # 16.
MC
I would like to hear more about how people chose their guesses. My guesses were all intuitive right-brain sort, without analysis at all, except on basis of emotional response to the writing. I got 4 correct out of the 17 I guessed, roughly 24%. I thought about doing it in a more analytic manner but decided against it as a real story reader reads by intuition and not by reason.
I do have a question though about the samples. How many people did what I did and opened a random file and took out a random sample? How many people chose to pick a sample which was either contra-gender or gender neutral? How many analysed the samples and what method was used? How many guessed on a fuzzier basis?
GUESSED is about what gender got the most guesses. #3 had a tie.
Of the others, 12 of 16 had a match between guessed gender and POV gender.
POV GUESSED MATCH?
1 M F N
2 M M Y
3 M tie
4 F F Y
5 F F Y
6 ? F
7 M M Y
8 M M Y
9 F F Y
10 M F N
11 F F Y
12 F F Y
13 M M Y
14 F F Y
15 M M Y
16 M F N
17 M M Y
18 M F N
I didn't pick my writing sample at random. I specifically picked one with the opposite POV gender from me (which is hard, since I don't usually write from female POV).
[This message has been edited by wbriggs (edited March 08, 2005).]
I had two possibilities to choose from for my sample. The one I didn't choose was a (probably YA) fantasy, with a young girl as POV. I figured that would be too obviously female. So I went with the other which happened to have a male POV (it was #15). And slightly more people thought I was male than female (8 out of 15 votes).
Thanks Mike for running the experiment. It was fun
--Mel
I was #2 and I chose a selection that could stand alone and make sense. I avoided choosing dialogue because I felt that it would skew the vote toward whatever gender was most prominent in the conversation. For the same reason, I did not choose anything that was deep penetration into a character's thoughts. So that was about as "neutral" as I could find.
I actually put quite a bit of thought into each vote. Unfortunately, that did not seem to help me choose correctly.
I based my decision on how authentically I thought the gender of the POV character was portrayed and then on the subject matter. Anything romantic, I attributed to a female writer, which probably was not fair. The two that were the most difficult for me were #3 and #7.
Nice analysis. Hadn't thought about it that way. #6 POV gender was female.
mm
If there was a lot of dialogue, to tended to guess female.
I made notes on the first 4. 1 I guessed female because "edon" is a weird name, and it didn't otherwise seem to be a fantasy story. 2 had a spatial description, though as I recall it also contained the word "copse" which should have been a tipoff. 3 had a lot of dialogue. 4 had "Oh..." and "darling" which I thought sounded girly. But it was not written by a girl.
(Drumroll.......)
quote:
Female Score: 121
Male Score: 181The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
So I guess Hatrackers are better judges. (Quite right too!)
R
R
Sorry, I've been without email access for the past week, so I only just found out the results.
I'm #8.........gotcha!
(Except Dakota. Way to go, Dakota! )
And now I'm curious: Everyone else...how did you decide which sample was which gender? And what made you think I was male?
[This message has been edited by Jeraliey (edited March 12, 2005).]
It was a great example of how we really can't tell and writers do have the ability to 'be' anyone.
MC
Last night I received my first cheque for fiction. Yay!
When I opened the letter, the cheque was addressed to...Mr. T.J. Smith!
I was sure I had included my full name when I submitted even though I only published under my initials.
Fortunately I managed to adjust the "r" so that it looked like an "s".
