BlogHer - New Data Shows I'm Male - Comments

I'm new here

qutepangy — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 23:25:20 -0600

I went to Gender Genie and did as told. Guess what? It said I am a MALE! Oh boy, I have some real explaning to do - I wanna tell the world I am 100% natural and a good female!!

I am testing again TOMORROW with some other of my own text. Will update you if I get the CORRECT answer. lol Thanks Virginia - enjoy your blogs!

P.S. I couldn't wait till tomorrow and I tried again with the text before "P.S.". This time it said it thinks I am female. :)

How do I skew the results?

astroix — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 06:39:52 -0600

Is it even possible to have a sample turn out female? I also threw in five samples and purposely included some topics that are "traditionally" feminine or whatever. All male as well.
Interesting.

http://cheerstoambiguity.blogspot.com

I'm a guy, too! Now, pass the Bud...

Birdie Jaworski — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 19:00:02 -0600

I tested five - five! - samples. All male. What an interesting site, Virginia, thanks for posting it.

Birdie
La Pajaro
Beauty Dish

I knew I had big balls!

Suzanne Reisman — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 16:08:05 -0600

Three times out of three, I came out overwhelmingly male. The first test I ran was on a piece I am working on about liberals, conservatives, and charity - 641 female to 1130 male. Then I ran a piece from my blog responding to a nasty anonymous comment I received - 196 female, 308 male. Finally, I ran the Feminism & Gender recap of 2006, and it was 1160 female to 1871 male.

So there you have it. I'm happy to have such nice transgendered company.

Suzanne, BlogHer Contributing Editor - Feminsim & Gender
Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS)& Other Rants

I chose the last sections of

Mata H — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 20:29:51 -0600

I chose the last sections of my latest post here -- and was declared male by 10 points. 253/243.

~~ Contributing Editor, Mata H. also blogs relentlessly at Time's Fool

hmm

Mistress Of The Dorkness — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 17:27:22 -0600

instead of picking one of my typical technical posts, I picked the post about how I ended up working in a male-dominated field. I was declared female... VERY narrowly.

Melanie Perry
*not all who wander are lost*
my blog

New Data Shows I'm Male

Virginia DeBolt — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 14:57:16 -0600

A reference on Adventures in Educational Blogging today sent me in search of the Gender Genie. You paste in some text from your blog and the genie decides if the writer is male or female, masculine or feminine.

According to Adventures in Educational Blogging,

The Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an algorithm developed by Moshe Koppel, Bar-Ilan University in Israel, and Shlomo Argamon, Illinois Institute of Technology, to predict the gender of an author.

The Gender Genie claims to work best with samples of 500 words or more. I tried it with this blog entry, which is only 266 words. My female score for this entry was 374, but my male score was a whopping 500. I looked for a longer blog entry to try it again. Most of my blog entries are well under 500 words, so I used a tutorial about Firefox for my second test. I pasted in about half of it, 786 words, and the Genie again declared me male. This time the score was female 732, male 1131. I suddenly feel hair growing on my chest. Testosterone rushes to enlarge my biceps.

Susan from Adventures in Educational Blogging was deemed female with a short entry and male with a longer one. She summed it up with, "Whatever."

I deliberately picked entries about web design topics: my personal little test for built-in bias. Apparently the Gender Genie agrees with most the of conference organizers and program planners for web related events: only men write or think about these things. The authors of the algorithm mentioned previously say,

...we...find significant differences between male- and female-authored documents in the use of personal pronouns and certain types of noun modifiers: although the total number of nominals used by male and female authors is virtually identical, females use many more pronouns and males use many more noun specifiers...Pronouns send the message that the identity of the "thing" involved is known to the reader, while specifiers provide information about "things" that the writer assumes the reader does not know. Thus, one main locus of difference between men's and women's writing is the way the people, objects, collectives and institutions are presented.

It would be interesting to know what the Gender Genie decides about the BlogHer bloggers writing about politics, travel, motherhood, food or law.