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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.
