Author's Gender Genie: You Male or Female?

Fallen · Apr 23, 2012

I hope this is okay in here.... (and just let me know if this has been done before)

Just as light distraction and to show a more fun side to grammar, a fellow AWer passed on this link for a gender checker regard authorship (she knows who she is

all credit to her).

Basically, you feed it a 500-word extract, click on genre, and it will tell you if the author is male or female.

I used it because I'm female writing from a male's pov, and I wanted to see, more for narrative pov, what sex my work would be given based on my word choice.

For the experts: it's based on corpora study (British) of male and female texts from different genres. That may distort results slightly if you're American (I don't know if American texts are used), but as function words, articles, and negation use come up in the counts, I'm hoping it's not too much.

Anywho, here's the link:

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

If you skive long enough to submit a sample, I'd be interested to know the results. Especially if you're writing in the opposite sex: did it pick up female or male?

firedrake · Apr 23, 2012

Female Score: 377
Male Score: 618

Genie thinks the writer is male.

This makes me very happy.

BunnyMaz · Apr 23, 2012

I can't remember if it was this link specifically, but we did play around with a couple of sites that do this (analyse a piece of writing and guess the gender of the writer). It was pretty fun. I put in pieces by Pratchett, GRR Martin, Anne McCaffrey, and a few others and it got every single one of them wrong. It got me wrong, too.

*edit*
Here's the thread.

It's still a lot of fun playing with these things, though. And it's especially interesting to see what words are male/female coded according to the site.

Fallen · Apr 23, 2012

firedrake said:
Female Score: 377
Male Score: 618

Genie thinks the writer is male.

This makes me very happy.

Brilliant, that makes you male pov in that extract too.

BunnyMaz said:
I can't remember if it was this link specifically, but we did play around with a couple of sites that do this (analyse a piece of writing and guess the gender of the writer). It was pretty fun. I put in pieces by Pratchett, GRR Martin, Anne McCaffrey, and a few others and it got every single one of them wrong. It got me wrong, too.

*edit*
Here's the thread.

It's still a lot of fun playing with these things, though. And it's especially interesting to see what words are male/female coded according to the site.

Thank you!! On what words... tickles me the women get the negatives.

Snick · Apr 23, 2012

I have used that and another such site for curiosity and because it is an interesting matter. The results are usually accurate, and I enjoyed trying to get different results, which I did manage. There are some articles about the system.

GingerGunlock · Apr 23, 2012

Oh neat! I cut 'n' pasted from the current WIP into both the Gender Genie linked here, and the one from the other thread. Gender Genie, with a shorter passage, guessed male. With a longer one, female. With the same one, the Hacker Factor's Gender Guesser guessed "weak male", which might indicate European (lol wut?)

Definitely interesting. Sometimes I have trouble figuring out if an author or narrator is male or female. Now the gender guesser is here with criteria!

Jamesaritchie · Apr 24, 2012

Female Score: 720
Male Score: 678

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

Nope, I'm male, and write mostly action/adventure.

Tried a second story and got:

Female Score: 1593
Male Score: 1290

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

Nope, wrong again.

Maryn · Apr 24, 2012

I'm getting an error code 400, whatever that is, when I try it. Too bad. I wanted to see if I was a big softie like James!

Maryn, nudging his ribs

Mark G · Apr 24, 2012

I put my "Fae in the City" Ch. 1 through it, and this is what I got:

Words: 1751

(NOTE: The genie works best on texts of more than 500 words.)

Female Score: 2494
Male Score: 1957

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

Considering I'm writing a female POV, that's great!!!

Cyia · Apr 24, 2012

I did three, got one female, one male, and one dead center.

The female was a character-oriented piece with female character narrating.
The male was an action-oriented piece with a female character narrating.
The dead center was a girl pretending to be a boy, so...

Fallen · Apr 24, 2012

Hey thanks, guys. Looks like it's not doing too bad at the moment.

Cyia: interesting results. Especially that last one.
James: I wonder if a non-fic text would give the same gender?
MarkG: thank you for the note on 500+

GingerG: glad you enjoyed it.
Snitch: good to see your game for giving it a go.
Maryn: obviously your work was way too AWESOME to process

MoLoLu · Apr 24, 2012

Hmm... interesting.

Never more than 100+/- in either direction (with longer text excerpts, meaning 2k+, tending father towards male - where they probably *should* be). Wonder what that means about my writing...

DeleyanLee · Apr 24, 2012

Seen this before. It's great fun.

What's even more fun is that it's completely correct at identifying the gender of my POV character, not me.

Tells me that I'm likely doing something right, y'know?

L.C. Blackwell · Apr 24, 2012

I posted two selections from the same WIP. One read female and one read male. Both were scenes with male characters, but one was more reflective and used complex sentences; the other was terse.

Cliffhanger · Apr 24, 2012

Odd that the genie denotes all articles (the, a, an) as male. Curious too that "said" is a male word when 99% of writing advice books say that's the only dialog tag you should use.

First person fiction would likely score higher on feminine words as me, myself, and we are denoted as female. Likewise including female characters is considered feminine as she and hers are both feminine.

Interesting. Thanks for the links.

Fallen · Apr 25, 2012

@cliff. Hmmm, I hadn't thought about pov differences. I know mine was 1st and came up as male. Good point to take into consideration, though.

@L.C. Thank you for taking the test and sharing

@Del: I'm a little ashamed to admit that it's the first one I've come across

@MoLo: Have you tried another piece to see if it differs?

MoLoLu · Apr 25, 2012

Fallen said:
@MoLo: Have you tried another piece to see if it differs?

Cliffhanger said:
Odd that the genie denotes all articles (the, a, an) as male. Curious too that "said" is a male word when 99% of writing advice books say that's the only dialog tag you should use.

First person fiction would likely score higher on feminine words as me, myself, and we are denoted as female. Likewise including female characters is considered feminine as she and hers are both feminine.

Interesting. Thanks for the links.

I wondered about the 1st person 'words' when checking the results but didn't go far enough to reach a conclusion.

Indeed it's 1st throwing it off for me. 3rd person gave a much clearer result. Interesting...

DrZoidberg · Apr 25, 2012

I'm a woman. Who knew? I have a very large clitoris.

Female Score: 7563
Male Score: 4719

LynnKHollander · Apr 25, 2012

In the 1K sample, my male/female scores were 10 points apart. In the 200+/- sample, I'm male.
Before I take GG too seriously, though, I'd like to see their criteria for categorizing/labeling the words they use.

Rufus Coppertop · Apr 25, 2012

Female 498
Male 1001

Jamesaritchie · Apr 25, 2012

Fallen said:
@cliff. Hmmm, I hadn't thought about pov differences. I know mine was 1st and came up as male. Good point to take into consideration, though.

@L.C. Thank you for taking the test and sharing

@Del: I'm a little ashamed to admit that it's the first one I've come across

@MoLo: Have you tried another piece to see if it differs?

First or third made no difference with my samples. I've now tried six, three in first person and three in third, and all six came up female.

VTwriter · Apr 25, 2012

Female Score: 1315
Male Score: 921
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

Double-checking to make sure. . . Yep, I'm definitely male.

shadowwalker · Apr 25, 2012

L.C. Blackwell said:
I posted two selections from the same WIP. One read female and one read male. Both were scenes with male characters, but one was more reflective and used complex sentences; the other was terse.

Same here. Androgynous, perhaps? :tongue

KRHolbrook · Apr 26, 2012

Female Score: 741
Male Score: 733
The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: female!

Whew, that was a close one! XD

skylark · Apr 30, 2012

The dealbreaker in everything I tried was whether "was" outweighed "is" or not.

So all my past tense stories are "female" and all my present tense stories are "male".

Which is pretty much 100% the wrong way round, because for reasons only known to my subconscious, my female POV stories tend to be present tense and my male POV stories tend to be past tense.

Author's Gender Genie: You Male or Female?

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