Barb posted her thoughts on blog writing. In particular, the fact that many women bloggers have a male writing style. I don’t really know what that means. Perhaps it has to do with more journalistic prose, bereft of modifiers.
Anyway, I decided to put my manhood on the line and checked a couple of my longer posts (more than 500 words is recommended).
Male Score: 931
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
At least I was this morning.
So you won’t be flouncing around in petticoats and painting your nails any time soon? LOL
Comment by Barb — February 21, 2005 @ 2:13 pm
How did you know I paint my toenails?
Comment by Bunker — February 21, 2005 @ 3:03 pm
Female Score: 783
Male Score: 852
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!
Got me as male….but possible a little more in touch with my feminine side!
Comment by Wallace-Midland Texas — February 21, 2005 @ 3:45 pm
Okay…here it comes!
Words: 781
(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)
Female Score: 352
Male Score: 2301
Alright all you ‘swishers!’ Let’s get that head up and chest out, shoulders back!!!
Just kidding, but it’s an intersting site to take a peek at.
I’m off to finish doing my laundry. Yes, I do my own. 😀
See you on the high ground!
MajorDad1984
Comment by MajorDad1984 — February 21, 2005 @ 10:35 pm
That thing’s wrigged! It counts “the”, one of the most come words in the English language, as male! Everything I submitted came out male some of it very strongly so.
Comment by Samantha — February 22, 2005 @ 9:34 pm
Gender Geniew
This was an interesting test. In a recent posting James Joyner of Outside the Beltway talks about: Why So Few Female Pundits? So, now Bunker has a link to a tool which guesses at your gender based on a sample of your writing.
Trackback by View From Tonka — February 23, 2005 @ 6:47 am
The original research almost has ro be culturally skewed. They came up with the algorithm by statistical analysis of male and female BRITISH writers. So the algorithm is suspect for American writers, and probably even for different regional writers. Somewhere, some Ph.D. candidates should be applying the methodology to other groups.
While I think there’s some merit to statistical mining of mountains of data like this, there’s lots of ways that subject matter can further skew the results. A chapter from my book — a software development book on the role of communication in design — reports as pretty strongly male. But this blog post (http://www.blogoram.com/001161.php#001161) on beautiful women reports surprisingly as female.
Comment by UML Guy — February 24, 2005 @ 4:17 am
Oh yeah?! I am, too, a guy!
I really love how social “scientists” use all their grant money to come up with such things. Must be Federal grant money because the outcome is pretty worthless information.
Comment by Bunker — February 24, 2005 @ 4:42 pm