I was browsing reddit.com the other day and came across an interesting website. It’s called the Gender Genie and it uses an algorithm to predict the gender of the author of a piece of writing. I’m always curious as to how others perceive my writing, even if it is only a piece of software. I decided to take one of my blog entries and paste it into the Gender Genie. Considering that I’m male, the results were a little disconcerting.
According to this website, my article was written by a female. Just barely. I didn’t realize that my writing was so androgynous. It occurred to me that I should probably give the website a little hint to help it along. I decided to put in a little tidbit of information at the end of the text that would help it identify my true gender.
This time I received an even higher female to male score! It seemed more convinced than ever that I wasn’t male. The results made me wonder a little. If I don’t have a vagina and I’m not male, then what kind of freakish female does it think I am? Anyway, it was time to take a more direct route. I decided to feed it some information that, if the program worked as advertised, would in no way cause it to mistake me for a female.
Yet again it thinks I’m female, although my male score improved marginally. I suppose there’s no winning with this thing. Maybe I’m a girly writer after all. Or maybe this software is a piece of crap.
