Gender genie?

[xDemode]

That's what the link says.

http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php

I have no clue if this has been posted already. So forgive me if this is a repeat thread. (But cut me some slack too. It's a big forum.)

This site is supposed to be able to detect female authors from male authors, just by giving a sample of the writing.

I always come out female, no matter what block of text I throw in. And well, I AM female. BUT... my MC is male. Honestly, I don't know what to make of that. Is that a bad thing? I hope not.

So I'm wondering what everyone else gets and whether this thing is accurate.

[clockwatcher]

So far, I've gotten about 3 males and 5 or 6 females. I'm female, by the way.

The males were from stories written from a male POV so I don't know if that makes a difference. Do I really write more male when I try to? Hmm.

[xDemode]

So far, I've gotten about 3 males and 5 or 6 females. I'm female, by the way.

The males were from stories written from a male POV so I don't know if that makes a difference. Do I really write more male when I try to? Hmm.

I'm jealous. I wish I could write more like a male. :D

[CACTUSWENDY]

:)....

Female Score: 233
Male Score: 311

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Well, got one 'person' fooled. Took a passage of my serial killer...male, doing his thing. ;)

(Interesting what they picked as 'key' words.)

[L M Ashton]

Evidently I'm a male. And the scene was with my female main character, too. Er...

[KTC]

I love this. Thanks for the post. I got:

Female Score: 318
Male Score: 318
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: unknown!


The interesting thing is I got this same response with 11 excerpts from 3 different novels so far. I'm going to try some more...but I love that I am getting this response. It is EXACTLY what I had hoped for!

ETA: Finally...a gender specific answer, by a nose:
Female Score: 712
Male Score: 710
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

[Wraith]

Female Score: 318
Male Score: 318
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: unknown!
Lol, that's awesome! There's no gender to genius. :tongue

I write in Romanian, but I entered an English text (something about a monster) and I got:

Female Score: 282
Male Score: 387

Which means I'm a male. Ooops!

But really, the feminine/masculine analysis made me go WTF? Those are very common words.

:Shrug:

[misslissy]

Female every time.

Something interesting though, I'd definitely agree.

[LilliCray]

If I took all the male keywords and copied and pasted them into a Word document, would I get a female score of 0?

I entered one piece with two female MCs and one with two male MCs, not from the same WIP. The first said I was female, the second said I was male. Veeeeeery interesting.... :D

[Haphazard]

The only time I ever get male is when I write with female characters.

Which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

It's automatically skewed that when you write in first person to skew female (words like "me" and "we" are counted feminine...) and I usually write first person male and third person female.

Crazy, innit?

[WittyandorIronic]

My 3rd person female MC POV romance snippet came out overwhelmingly female. lol.
I just c&ped the portion I wrote for the thread in Writing Prompts, "Write the start of a novel", so I hadn't edited it or really worked it, but there were WAY too many "nots". lol. I will have to keep an eye out for that.

[KTC]

The one novel I took excerpt after excerpt from had no female characters. It still said it didn't know. And it was actually the novel that I finally got the female reading from...I've tried some more. I can't get a male reading no matter what I paste.

[waylander]

Consistently coming up as female which is........interesting.

[maxmordon]

I chose to put exerpts of famous novels to see what does famous authors get:

George Orwell's 1984:

Female Score: 109
Male Score: 91

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!


Aldous Huxley's A Brave New World:

Female Score: 155
Male Score: 179

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!


Ernest Hemingway:


Female Score: 27
Male Score: 66

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!


J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Pilosopher's stone:


Female Score: 75
Male Score: 101

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!


Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice:

Female Score: 45
Male Score: 100

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!


Anne Rice's Interview with the vampire:


Female Score: 170
Male Score: 127

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

The Iliad:

Female Score: 60
Male Score: 60

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: unknown!


Virginia Woolf's Orlando:


Female Score: 53
Male Score: 99

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

[lkp]

The Iliad:

Female Score: 60
Male Score: 60

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: unknown!



Well, they got that part right I guess.

[maxmordon]

I wonder what does a translation gets. What about if the MC is female, the writer is male and the translator is female? or the other way around???

[Haphazard]

I wonder what does a translation gets. What about if the MC is female, the writer is male and the translator is female? or the other way around???

That's really interesting to think about... because a lot of them are by parts of speech (apparently, pronouns are feminine and prepositions are masculine), I'd still say that the original writer would have a lot of say in it.

[truelyana]

This is a really interesting site, and I couldn't resist. Apparently I'm male too, by 276 higher then 169. I have only tried out one story so far.

[WittyandorIronic]

The one novel I took excerpt after excerpt from had no female characters. It still said it didn't know. And it was actually the novel that I finally got the female reading from...I've tried some more. I can't get a male reading no matter what I paste.

lol...this just made me laugh. I immediately thought of all the school yard bullies yelling "You write like a girl!" HAHA. thanks for the laugh.

[Shady Lane]

Chapter 1 of WIP:

Female Score: 1100
Male Score: 1296

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!


Chapter 2:


Female Score: 1016
Male Score: 859

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!


Chapter 3:

Female Score: 1158
Male Score: 1273

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!


Chapter 4:



Female Score: 1131
Male Score: 886

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!







....this could go on for awhile...

(soy chica, btw)

[ACEnders]

this is hilarious! thanks for this thread..it was interesting seeing what others got! I got female...so I guess it worked for me.

[Danger Jane]

it's some really complex math. Those common words actually are key because apparently women tend to use more personal pronouns and men tend to use more articles and quantifiers. for instance.


Mine are usually overwhelmingly female. I analyzed some classics, Dickens and Woolf and they were fairly androgynous.

PROBABLY it has to do with my wild female teenager hormones and will calm down eventually. Then I will be ready to write CLASSICS


ETA: I used very large samples--the entirety of two of my stories, full text of Mrs. Dalloway, and only the first chapter of A Tale of Two Cities, because it froze my internet from longness.

And interesting to note because Virginia Woolf did write a whole essay thing on how great writers wrote from an androgynous mind.

[donut]

I'm male about 2/3 of the time, whether using fiction or blog entries. But it's always fairly close.

(I'm generally considered female, though not a big fan of gender myself)

[DeleyanLee]

I've seen this site before, it's great fun. When I test a male POV scene, it always comes out male. When I test a female POV scene, it always comes out female. I'm extremely pleased with those results. :-D

[ORION]

I did 600 words from LOTTERY

Female Score: 670
Male Score: 831
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

hmmm...what's really interesting is that about 60% of my emails from readers are from males.
For those who do not know I am most definitely female...

[Perks]

That's so weird. Out of ten excerpts I tried, it thought seven were male. Hmmmm. That's very interesting.

[KTC]

lol...this just made me laugh. I immediately thought of all the school yard bullies yelling "You write like a girl!" HAHA. thanks for the laugh.


Don't make me wave a shiny shiny Twinkie in front of your face and tell you to, "Close your eyes and open your mouth and you'll get a big surprise!" Because the surprise will be the worm I'm carrying in the hand behind my back, Nasty.

[Ravenlocks]

My fiction seems to be female (although I've gotten mixed results in the past), non-fiction and blogs are mixed.

[CheshireCat]

Interesting. My stuff is judged male more often than female by more than three to one. And the more text I test, the more likely the results come up male -- no matter the POV or gender of the characters in the scene.

Assuming there's any validity to the test at all, I'm pleased with the results; it's considered more difficult to write from the POV of the gender you're not, and I often do that, so apparently I'm fairly convincing in the maleness of my male characters. :D

Plus, given the genre I was testing, a thriller, coming across as more male than female is probably a good thing.

[Saanen]

Wow, that's really interesting! I tried it with samples of three pieces. The one written in third person with a male MC was definitely male. The one in first person with a male MC skewed as female first and then (with a different sample) as male, but both times it was close. The one written in first person with a female MC was overwhelmingly female.

So I feel pretty darn good about my writing, particularly since the third person male piece is my NaNo book and I wasn't sure if I was hitting the right tone for his very masculine character.

Ooh, ooh, I have to check my book that is written in third, with a male MC in the first half and a female MC in the second half! Edit with the results: Weird--the male MC samples (two of them) show as very female, while the first female MC sample came out as female but almost balanced with male, and the second sample was definitely female. I guess I didn't do a very good job with that one! But then again, it's hard to tell because I wrote that book after the style of 1920s murder mysteries, specifically Dorothy Sayers, so I wasn't really using my own voice.

This is fun!

[CaroGirl]

Excerpts from my latest novel were assessed as male twice out of three times. Only one got me a higher female score and that one was pretty close (almost 50/50). Maybe this means men will like my book as much as women!

[Roanoke]

My main characters tend to come out male, but all the others come out female and the darker stuff is more male, but fights are almost split even.
Odd.

[arodriguez]

i got male 10 times in arow, from different excerpts.

I did one romance scene and it came out female..im gonna edit it out.
Made me feel icky.

[wayndom]

According to the genie, I'm female. This will come as a shock to my penis. [Insert Guantanamo Bay joke here.]

I suppose I should be proud, since the passage I entered follows my female MC's POV...

More interesting to me is the method, which amounts to counting "masculine keywords" and "feminine keywords." Now I don't have a problem with the concept of masculine and feminine choices in vocabulary, but the genie lists "a" and "the" as masculine keywords. Huh? You mean "the" is the most used word in English because of sexism???

I suppose just to be fair, "and" is a feminine keyword.

[Walks away, shaking his head in bewilderment...]

[wayndom]

Excerpts from my latest novel were assessed as male twice out of three times. Only one got me a higher female score and that one was pretty close (almost 50/50). Maybe this means men will like my book as much as women!

Then you're in trouble, since women buy far more books than men. (Ignore me, I'm just gloating because my female-MC'ed WIP was proclaimed female...)

[Tobin Erebusan]

The Book of Genesis, Chapter 4

Words: 637

Female Score: 647
Male Score: 583

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

I find that rather funny. I doubt women were trusted to write the Bible in that culture.

[ello]

This is very cool. I tried 3 sections. The two male sections came out resoundingly male. While my female MC passage came out slightly female. And only because it analyzed for key words like "her." Very interesting. but what does this all mean? Anyone?

[Danger Jane]

I don't think this has much to do with readers' perceptions of the author or the tone--I think this test comes from a very scientific and mathematical background, and the words that hint toward a feminine passage and the words that hint toward a masculine passage probably have a lot to do with deeply ingrained cultural standards, or maybe just deeply ingrained genetics and thought processes.

The science behind this suggests that men, or masculine brains, tend to think in more objective terms--a something, the something--than women, or feminine brains, which tend to think in personal terms and in connections--my something, your something.

So I'm not sure if by achieving a male or female score with the gender genie means you've nailed the tone for your passage or POV character or whatever.* Maybe these keywords do signal something to readers, on a very subliminal level. But I think what the test shows more is the difference between the way men think and the way women think, or the way a masculine brain thinks and the way a feminine brain thinks, because there are differences. Here's an extremely long article on the topic:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=00018E9D-879D-1D06-8E49809EC588EEDF

*I say this because pronouns and prepositions, while obviously important, are not the main contributors to tone, and topic is irrelevant to this test.

[arodriguez]

but i still feel icky

[sanctuary6284]

First run:

Female Score: 514
Male Score: 387

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!


Second Run:

Female Score: 938
Male Score: 1062

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

Think I'll try a 3rd piece of writing just to see what I get.

Edit: I find it odd that when I look at my totals the only reason I end up with a score that says I'm male (which is right btw) is because I use 'the' a lot. If I had "the" in my writing less it would always give me a female score. Now I don't know if anyone's checked lately but what are that sales stats for female vs male writers? That would make this test more interesting.

[Wolvel]

Well it does not know how to tell.

female=1070
male=774

I'm male.

[Prawn]

I am totally female! I posted two big chunks of my first novel, and each time I was emasculated by the algorithm.

[FntsyScribe]

Wow, I did this for four of my chapters from my WIP, and I scored male every time! Which is awesome, since my MC is male. Maybe I will pull this off......