gender fascination

[eirias]

Fascinating. I recently found the Gender Genie, a site that will take an input of text (>=500 words is best) and guess the gender of the person who's written it. I had a hunch, for some reason that is unclear in my mind but that distinctly relates to tone, that my public LJ entries would mark me as a male and that my private entries would mark me as a female. I was correct. I should note that I gave a larger sample for my public entries, so there is a potential confound, but both sets were well above the 500-word threshold. This is largely because I went further back in my public entry history, as so many of them are short, and in the process came upon some very long ones.

Comments

[rms10.livejournal.com]

I tried it myself a while ago. Casual emails and journal entries were guessed as female, and excerpts from papers I'd written for class were marked as male.

I'm curious as to what they used to calibrate the Gender Genie.

[darlox.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, my results seem to be completely backwards from the norm. My casual writings (like LJ) scan correctly as male. My professional writings -- including a termination letter I wrote to an ex-employee -- parsed as female! I guess I'm just a girlie corporate raider... ;)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Clearly you wear a strap-on in public.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

This assumes that my private entries are more "real," which I think is not true for all people! I could be like those guys who don't feel like women or want to be women, but have a hobby of dancing in front of their mirrors while wearing women's panties.

[eldan.livejournal.com]

thank you for that mental picture, which will probably be in my head for the rest of the day.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

That's especially precious since I think you're the only person on this filter who can't actually picture me doing that, and who for that matter has no first hand evidence that it isn't true ;)

(Well, not quite; there is at least one person I've friended who is a random webcomic artist and he has no idea what I look like... but he is quite popular, and I am fairly confident I do not make his must-read list on LJ ;) )

[eldan.livejournal.com]

well it's not you specifically - it's just the mental picture of some bloke dancing in front of a mirror while wearing women's panties. Having only a very vague idea of what you look like, I am unable to picture you dancing in front of mirrors, normally dressed or otherwise. I leave it to the reader to determine whether my life is richer or poorer for this.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Having a very specific idea of what eirias looks like, I still find it very hard to picture her dancing in front of mirrors in any state of dress.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

I think the general consensus is that not having seen me dance is a blessing.

[madmanatw.livejournal.com]

That's especially precious since I think you're the only person on this filter who can't actually picture me doing that, and who for that matter has no first hand evidence that it isn't true ;)

And while I probably wouldn't have otherwise, now that there's been this much talk of it, I obviously must devote some mental energy to imagining this.

[eirias.livejournal.com]

(by "first hand evidence," incidentally, I mean "having seen me at a close enough distance to figure out that I'm probably female." And by "close enough distance" I mean "in clothes." I feel obliged to specify that the vast majority of my friends list has not in fact seen me nude.)

[madmanatw.livejournal.com]

I suppose for once I won't make my usual comment here. :)

[drspiff.livejournal.com]

Interesting. My writing is consistently rated as male. I even threw in a couple poems I had written and it parsed them as male. My private entries involving discussion of personal feelings were rated slightly female but based on the numbers, I'd say those were always a toss up. This is very curious because I thought my tendancy to fall back into a passive voice would get me labeled "female."

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

They don't seem to be analyzing grammatical characteristics, just word choice.

And His Minkliness is...

[minkoflove.livejournal.com]

Ramón tests as strangely ambiguous. I put some of his writings in there, and the scores were always pretty close (but tilted a bit toward female). But if I told it that they were blog entries rather than nonfiction (which i think would be the proper classification), it made me unambiguously male.

Re: And His Minkliness is...

[eirias.livejournal.com]

ukelele and I were just discussing that, actually -- how to classify stuff like essays and opinion pieces. I came down on the side of "blog entry," uke came down on the side of "nonfiction." (In any case it is my dearest hope that Ramon's writings are pure fiction.)

[eirias.livejournal.com]

(by "first hand evidence," incidentally, I mean "having seen me at a close enough distance to figure out that I'm probably female." And by "close enough distance" I mean "in clothes." I feel obliged to specify that the vast majority of my friends list has not in fact seen me nude.)

[minkoflove.livejournal.com]

But Ramón would like to add that you are cute nude. :)

[roamin-umpire.livejournal.com]

Curse you! I've now spent half an hour chucking blocks of text into the thing. Then again, I've also found some neat opinion pieces, so I guess the time was spent well enough.

It seems to get my stuff right much more often than the average - everything I've been able to dig up that I've written has come up as unequivocally male. It seems I like to use the word "the" far more often than most. There were two mistakes - one where a male friend's blog entry about his role-playing game came up female, and one set of mswae's lab instructions, which registered as male.

[kirin]

Just fpr another data-point, the most recent 800-odd words of my LJ mark me as slightly female. Really, though it seems pretty close to a tie (though I didn't get the "I can't tell" answer). Not terribly surprising.