I propose an experiment. Let's get 10 males and 10 females to each agree to write a short piece and then post them all anonymously. Once all the posts are in we'll vote to see if we as a group can detect gender based upon writing.

I bet that we can't tell the difference, but I also bet that it will be difficult to come up with an exercise topic that isn't of itself gender biased.

Wasn't there an internet test awhile back that we were playing with? You submitted a paragraph and some program determined if you were male or female. Wasn't very accurate, as I remember.

Ultimately, I don't see any real difference.

I say that instead of having a specific topic, why not let the participants choose their own? According to Vox Day, the man who got these ideas going in our heads, that should show as much gender bias as the writing style itself.

Quick story on gender confusion:

On a political board I used to visit, there was a woman who had a very feminine screen name, and flirted quite a bit with the guys on the board when she wasn't giving out her opinion on current events. One of the guys actually went out to meet her and discovered she was a he.

The worst thing about it was that it was a conservative board. She got banned and flamed and everything else those guys could do in virtual reality.

So a way to defeat the bias in subject would be to have two subjects, one from a girl and one from a boy.

[Edited for a horrible typo]

...that was a pretty funny typo, Jsteg! Your secret's safe with me.

I'm not sure why the name Keeley would seem masculine. I've chosen other screen names that were, I thought anyway, gender-neutral. I usually only use those screen names when I go to places where I think my opinion will be valued less or my personal safety will come into question if people knew I was a woman.

Says something about this board, doesn't it?

I have a question, though, regarding gender voice in writing and this exercise. If the purpose of doing this is to see how much of our gender shows through our writing, does that imply that the best kind of writer is one who tries to stay gender neutral?

What I mean is, should a writer avoid sounding either like a woman or a man when writing his/her stories unless the character and POV demand it?

And should I put this question in a separate topic?

This would be a good time to make any further comments on how you think it should be executed.

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

I put in two entries, both by the same female author.

The program guessed the first entry's gender correctly. The second, it didn't.

2 stereotypically female scenes (needlepoint and talking about boys), female POV: both female

2 stereotypically male scenes (huntin' and fishin'), male POV: both male

1 male POV scene discussing feelings: rated as female

----

I tried that Gender Genie thing on seven different stories and it only guessed right one and a half times (one story scored a 15 point difference in favour of female; so while it was technically correct, the score could have easily swung the other way).

Rick, looks like the mindless website disagrees with your opinion!

I suggest that the experiment be revised to use writing done before this experiment was proposed. If submissions are restricted to portions of projects that have not been critiqued by Hatrackers, it is highly unlikely that anyone will know the identity of the author.

Update: Even allowing people to select portions of their own work may lead to some bias, but it won't be as bad. It would be best to select passages at random.

Anything I propose will have little technical validity as the experiment is too small to attach much in the way of significance. And although I could design an experiment that would be statistically valid, the odds of getting enough volunteers to design something on which I could legitimately run stats,would be slim to none. *whew! ran out of breath*

So, I'll settle for something less.

MichelleAnn, I tried some samples at your bookblog site and found that the samples from the two stories where I tried to write for brighter readers were declared feminine and the samples of the story I'm writing in a more concrete fashion for general readers were declared male. The key here is complexity rather than word count.

I think that what their program is actually doing rather than counting words is measuring parallel versus linear thought and measuring levels of abstraction, as implied by words.

I have a theory about why this sexual differentiation would occur as a countable phenomenom. Women are more often trained from childhood to parallel verbal processing and absrtaction but men are trained to more singular contrete processing. In other words I believe that more often male children are encouraged to produce simplistic straightforward ideas about physical things and females encouraged to produce more ways of working on ideas themselves.

Boys are more often sent out to play (Well actually that was when I was a child. Now they are put on Ritalin and sent to the bedroom to play video games. ) while girls are absorbed into the maternal circle of conversation. (This independent play versus maternal/child interaction may also be one of the reasons why more boys go into experimental science and more girls into the humanities.)

I don't believe sexual differentiation of verbal skill is so much of an innate process as we are led to believe, but rather a process of hundreds of repetitions of reward and punishment as the child learns language function.

[This message has been edited by keldon02 (edited March 04, 2005).]

How about this? We'll do it in two stages.

Firstly, I'll prepare a really generic scene (for example: a child is eating a banana) and post it. You look at it and rewrite it two times: once from the female point of view, and once from the male point of view. Then you send them to me. I'll post them all anonymously and you and other Hatrackers will vote on which of the female POV rewrites were credible as being written by a female, and which are not. Ditto for the male POV rewrites. I will then present the following results:

1)all voters opinion of the male POVs as credibly written by a male
2)all voters opinion of the female POVs as credibly written by a female
3)all male voters opinion of the male POVs as credibly written by a male
4)all female voters opinion of the male POVs as credibly written by a male
5)all male voters opinion of the female POVs as credibly written by a female
6)all female voters opinion of the female POVs as credibly written by a female

Then, after we do that, we'll use EricJamesStone idea, OR we can do his first.

I like the idea of sending something that was writen prior to this thread, however I would be willing to do both.

As much as we might want to be 'undetectable', face it we are different. We, meaning male vs female, think differently, process information differently and react to things differently.
Now having said that I will flush it all by saying that I too thought many of the females on this site were males the first time around. So ... what was I saying?

Mike, I'll wait to see how your post shakes out when you have it ready.

That, I think, would be the simplest solution.