There are lots of things in CompLing that I wish I’d thought of. Here’s one: the Gender Genie.
Just paste in some text (perhaps even a blog post from your humble Good Reason host), hit frappé, and it’ll give a guess as to the sex of the author.
I come up as male, as does PZ Myers, and (somewhat interestingly) Andrew Sullivan and TRex from Firedoglake. (Well, I had to check.) The wonderful Digby, had she not outed herself as female, would have been sniffed out by the Genie. Ann from feministing.com comes up male more than once. Walcott‘s running 50-50.
It works much differently than one might expect. It ignores all the manly or non-manly words like ‘explosion’ or ‘needlepoint’, and instead uses a very small set of function words. Each time you use ‘with’, that’s 52 points on the female side. Each use of ‘around’ gives you 42 male points. Women get pronouns: she, me, hers, we. Men get all the determiners: the, a, some, more. Add them up and see which side of the scale is heavier.
I don’t know what we can generalise from this about male/female communication, but it’s very cool.
28 August 2008 at 5:47 pm
As I suspected I would – I came up male. Each time – even having chosen a variety of different posts from my blog. Sigh. No wonder my mother despairs of me.
10 December 2009 at 2:33 am
I have been playing with this gender genie on and off for a few days. All my writing comes up overwhelmingly male, (Does this make me some kind of female metrosexual?) so I have run the following tests with the following results:
Little Britain: overwhelmingly male;
Carol Ann Duffy: male;
Jane Austen: marginally male;
Earnest Hemingway: male (not overwhelmingly!). Here's something else (just a little sexist?) from Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms" (Ch 2):
"All thinking men are atheists."
Its odd, but I'm starting to get the difference between male and female writing/language styles, even if these test assumptions look challengeable on the face of it.