Seriously? Writing like a man.

[terriko]

New Scientist: Gender-spotting tool could have rumbled fake blogger.

It turned out the author of the blog, "Gay Girl in Damascus", was a man – something the online gender checker would have picked up on. When New Scientist fed the text of the last blog post into the software, it said that the author was 63.2 per cent likely to be male.

Seriously? This is not journalism. This is not news. My last three entries: two of them rank me around 55% male (the other, 53% female, ironically in the most technical of the posts). The worst part of the article claims that:

Even a "neutral" decision might indicate that someone is trying to write in a gender voice that does not come naturally to them, he says. "It could be quite telling."

Clearly, I've been living a lie all this time and should be forced to confess... that I don't fit into their boxes very well.

Comments

*laugh*

[ysabetwordsmith]

What the checker determines is simply the closeness of the match to the way "most" masculine people or feminine people write. It doesn't actually predict the writer's gender well, just the writing. I was amused to find that it accurately determines ... whether I am writing in masculine or feminine mode.

[pleia2]

I intentionally avoided my techie posts and just posted in some paragraphs from my "blah blah about life" posts (which I thought were pretty feminine)

male 60.39%
male 57.26%

So what about a more techie post?

male 70.79%

So not only do I pay some guy in a basement to IRC for me (a joke floated around my old LUG because I'm such an IRC junkie), I guess also pay some guy to blog for me!

[delladea]

Submitted a few more recent entries and scored male every time in the 55% to 60% range.

This post was 76% percent male, way more male than anything else I tried. And here I thought my love of colorful gel pens would automatically give me feminine cred.