The Gender Genie
I think I may have posted about this years ago, but I was thinking about it again recently as I was writing a bunch of papers. The Gender Genie tries to guess the gender of a person based on a sample of their writing. Men and women have words that they tend use more often than the other gender. So the Gender Genie looks for these words and gives points for each one. Which ever group of words ends up with more points is likely to correspond to the gender of the writer.
So I decided to run all the papers I had to write for classes this summer and see what their scores were. What I'll be giving is a "masculinity rating", which is, the percentage of points that went to manly words out of the total.
Small States in Contemporary World Markets - 68%
Inequality and Democracy in America - 67%
Another Chance for Kyrgyzstan - 64%
International Political Economy Mid-Term - 63%
Untitled Paper About Bulgaria - 63%
International Political Theory Final - 61%
The gender of my papers is surprisingly consistent. Or more likely, my writing style is really consistent regardless of what I'm writing about. Looking over the list of words, I noticed that the female word list contains words like "we, you, me, etc." I try to avoid using first and second-person when doing formal writing, which would explain a bit.
2 comments:
So, I tried 4 of my papers. Two came out 57% male, a research paper on sports, and a business training and development research paper.
A blog post was feminine (I forgot the %).
A creative non-fiction about being a military wife was 54% masculine.
Though, with "feminine" being all me, my, hers, etc. and masculine getting all the prepositions, I'm thinking female writing in this algorithm equals bad writing.
"With" is a feminine preposition. You should use it more often.
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