T w e n t y S i d e d

Random surfing took me here, which led me to Gender Genie, which is a program that examines written text and attempts to ascertain the gender of the writer. Amazingly, the analysis is done on seemingly innocuous words like “if”, “with” and “where” and not by looking for obvious male / female subject matter like cars vs. cats. (Or whatever stereotypes seem likely.) Also interesting is the size of their word lists. Gender Genie uses just sixteen “female” words and 17 “male” ones when determining the supposed gender of the author.

The program claims 80% accuracy. That’s pretty interesting to me, although Gender Genie thinks I’m a woman. I tried out several long posts (their directions suggest that text should be at least 500 words in length) and Gender Genie regularly called me a woman. When I use shorter posts, my score tips female by an even wider margin. I tried text from a few people in my blogroll, and it correctly and unambiguously identified everyone else.

I wonder what it is about my style that is causing this? It really was amazing to see that my various ruminations on roleplaying games, videogames, and geek culture – all of which seem like nominally male-dominated pursuits to me – were somehow feminine to Gender Genie. I don’t think this is bad. I’m not insulted. I don’t think this means the software sucks. I just find it curious.

The gender politics behind the system will probably chafe some (it made me roll my eyes a couple of times) but laying aside why the designer thinks males and females use various words at the given frequency, the truth remains that males and females really do write differently and this difference can usually be detected via a brute-force word count. I can’t help but get the feeling that the authors might be trying to prove something about males and females with this exercise. Maybe one to many agenda-driven gender studies has left me paranoid and jaded. In any case, the mathematics at the end interest me far more than the reading of tea leaves taking place in the main body.

I’d like to see how it does against other people. I tried a few people from my regular reading list, although I don’t want to offend anyone by outing the gender of their authorial voice. If you want to try it yourself, just grab a longish post of yours, stick it into the thingy, and see what guess it makes about your gender.

And finally: This post, which is 450 words long, scores 525 female and 468 male. Maybe I should grow a mustache and see if that nudges the score in my favor.

LATER: Other reactions to the program here and here.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This site is where you can buy a Klein Bottle, a one-sided three-dimensional container with a volume of zero. (It doesn’t specify if the zero is in liters or gallons, though. A disappointing oversight. I don’t want to end up having to perform metric-to-imperial conversions while calculating how much nothing the thing can’t contain.)

They have to cheat a bit to get the thing into three-dimensional space. The nexus where the handle / neck intersects is displeasing, but it’s a necessary compromise because because most glassblowers refuse to work in four dimensions.

(Yes, I can see this site is ages old, almost prehistoric by internet standards. It’s so old it’s new again. Anyway, I’ve never seen it before.)

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.