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Some guys came up with an algorithm that supposedly does a decent job of predicting gender based on writing samples. Check it out.
It did a bang-up job calling out my (academic) writing, though it should be noted that most of that is in the fields of business, econ, linguistics, and science. The only academic papers I ran through it that came up with false positives were sociology. Interesting stuff. Apparently "the" is a masculine word.
Posts: 433 | Registered: Feb 2005
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Based on a long post from here I am just barely female, but it was a relationship advice post, so that makes sense.
Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Megan: Apparently, based on the introduction to my dissertation proposal, I am male.
Out of curiousity, what is your area of study? Some fields seem to exhibit distinct writing styles--perhaps there is a connection?
Posts: 433 | Registered: Feb 2005
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I ran a bunch of stuff through, including papers I've written for class, blog posts, Hatrack posts, and some old yearbook articles. Apparently, my writing style is male. This seems mostly to be based on my excessive use of the word "the." Also, the technical science paper writing style probably matches the "male" stereotype better. However, even my blog posts came out male. I had to dig out stuff from high school to get a female score. Even then, most of it registered male.
Posts: 3546 | Registered: Jul 2002
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I put through another post and came out male. It's not quite interesting enough to keep trying. Posts: 7954 | Registered: Mar 2004
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It got my gender correctly on my fictional writing, but I think that's because it skewed the results by using "as" and "the" as masculine words, which of course there were many of.
On my blog writing though, it guessed female. I don't find that surprising though.
Posts: 208 | Registered: Jun 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Phanto: Or maybe this is a stupid program.
Question the axioms!
Undoubtedly it is far from perfect. In fact, the site even indicates that it is using a simplified version of the algorithm. All the same, it is an interesting concept.
I put in excerpts from a few famous authors to see what might come up.
Dostoyevsky's The Idiot - Male Crime and Punishment - Male
J.K. Rowling - Female
Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Male in translation by Edith Grossman - Female
Pushkin, Eugene Onegin (in translation) - Male
Orson Scott Card, Hatrack River - Female.
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Ok, so the site doesn't really say much that's... useful. Just mildly interesting.
Posts: 433 | Registered: Feb 2005
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Academic paper: male Personal statement: male Journal entry about relationships: female, by a hair Journal entry about an event: male, barely
Possible conclusions: 1. The algorithm is faulty, being a better judge of so-called male and female topics rather than male and female writing.
2. Women are forced to mimic men's writing to be taken seriously an academic world.
3. My writing is more male than female.
My completely-unscientific vote is for 1 & 2.
Theory about the why "the" is a masculine word: It's definitive. Calling something "the" is placing it as first in its group. Not "a" genius of the twentieth century, but "THE" genius of the twentieth century. Women are often seen as more conciliatory, and hence the algorithm expects them to place more ambiguity in their speech to allow others wiggle room in the interpretations.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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All of my academic papers are marked as male (religious studies courses). I don't think it's incredibly scientific either.
Posts: 2867 | Registered: May 2005
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The algorithm predicted I was male based on most of my short stories. I noticed a particularly wide margin between the male and female scores when I pasted in my first attempt at science fiction. Another short story I wrote which takes place in Nazi Germany and is interspersed with telegrams/letters in pseudo-official lingo also yielded a noticeable gap. Casual observation suggests the algorithm roughly equates 'personal, subjective' with female and 'third person, impersonal, objective' with male.
I'm definitely with katharina on her second point. The first point could be a consequence of the second.
Still, this is very interesting. Thanks for sharing it Fusiachi.
Posts: 1762 | Registered: Apr 2006
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I agree with Euripides. It seems to take expressions of feelings to be more feminine than masculine, just by going by the scores I got.
Posts: 208 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Parts from my last two academic papers (Shakespeare and Palahniuk/Plato) came back as male. So did my thesis proposal on Satan.
My blog entries were split. In one dealing mainly with my relationship, they came back as female. The ones about the rest of my life came back as male.
My fiction, the most interesting test for me, was also split. I was kind of excited that the first one came back male since it was written from the perspective of a male character. The second one though was also a male narrative but came back as female. (Oddly enough, the first piece dealt with a male homosexual affair and the second from a male relating his heterosexual interests)
A poem which recently won me some money came out with an exactly split score. The writer was of "unknown gender."
Posts: 1733 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Obviously your poem is a gender-transcending work .
I can understand the loose linguistic thinking behind this test. Yes, I bet you there *are* statisical differences betwenn the word choices that men + women use. But what are they, how meaningful are they, and to what degree are they influenced by your close society? (I.e., is it an inherent feature of English that, say, women will say XXXOOOAM! more than guys, or is it an inherent feature of women living on the East coast.)
But I doubt that this test is based on anything serious and of lasting interest beyond that, of course, of random amusement in a boring world .
Posts: 3060 | Registered: Nov 2003
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I put about half a dozen papers through it, and it has been 100% accurate for me.
Judging by the posts here, it seems to have a harder time picking up female writing. Then again, this seems to be a pretty simplistic algorithm, so it may just be that the sort of people who frequent hatrack write in a way that is harder for the program to detect.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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It was about 50-50 for me. It thought I was a man as often as it thought I was a woman in various kinds of writing. I also put a sample of male writing that came out female.
Posts: 3149 | Registered: Jul 2005
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It was very accurate for me when it looked at my academic writing and stories. But when I put in lj entries it read me as being definitely female.
Posts: 1158 | Registered: Feb 2004
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My academic writing comes out overwhelmingly male, even the essay I wrote about a women in Judaism book. My lj is definitely female, and the one short story I submitted was just barely female.
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Okay, this is frustrating--I can get to the site, but when I click the "submit" (or whatever) button my work's firewall blocks is. Could someone do me a favor and enter in the text of the James Tiptree Jr. short story The Women Men Don't See? I'm curious to find out if this thing is any better at recognizing that she's a woman than Silverberg was.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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I thought it was pretty funny that a piece of flash fiction that I, a woman, wrote--a parody of bad romance writing done in first person from a woman's POV--came out as male.
After coming out male so often on my journal entries I'm beginning to wonder if it's not just my neutral screenname that causes people on Hatrack to assume I'm male so often!
Posts: 3149 | Registered: Jul 2005
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I copied in all three of my landmarks, one at a time, and each came up female. Then I put in two short stories by me, and they both came up female.
This is why I always get worked up about those "this is how men are and this is how women are" threads--because according to those generalizations, I am a woman.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Did you take that "brain gender" quiz from the BBC that I posted a year or two ago, Icarus? It'd be interesting to see how the results of that quiz correspond with the guesses made by this software.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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I think that this is the quiz I'm thinking of, but because my work's firewall is blocking it I can't be sure.
Posts: 16059 | Registered: Aug 2000
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I've never seen that one before. That one also says I'm a woman. :-\ But I did take one that someone posted that had a bunch of random personality questions, and it's been teaching itself, kind of like the 20 Questions games online, and that one said I was male. Barely.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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It's an odd conundrum trying to figure this out... Pretty much anyone who has had influence on my writing style during my life has been female. I wonder if that has influenced the results any.
Incidentally, the above passage is also female.
Posts: 1368 | Registered: Sep 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Noemon: I think that this is the quiz I'm thinking of, but because my work's firewall is blocking it I can't be sure.
Ouch, I came off solidly female there, so it seems that the writing test was more accurate for me. I'm not sure how good of a test this was, though. I'm curious to know how well this test matched up for other people on hatrack.
Posts: 2437 | Registered: Apr 2005
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Mine are evenly split. My feature stories are all coming up female and my hard-news stories are coming up male.
Posts: 1784 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Oh my goodness! threads dealing with gender and writing absolutely deserve to be linked to dinglesPosts: 5609 | Registered: Jan 2003
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I tested both my blogs and my fiction writing. My fiction always came out as male by a decent margin (62% or above). My blogs are almost always male as well (with a few rare exceptions) but only by a slight bit (usually only 51% male or so).
Posts: 1960 | Registered: May 2005
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I put a bunch of my fiction in, and I'm almost always male, with the occaisional female- a story about a pregnant girl, for instance, ha ha. Even my very oldest stories, all about girls and twins and things, are male.
In non-fiction (school essays), I'm male.
I think that using words like "said" to indicate maleness is pretty thoughtless, but then this whole concept is pretty thoughtless.
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