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

[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.