Gender Genie

[Rayaan]

Inspired by an article and a test in The New York Times Magazine, 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. Read more at BookBlog, The New York Times, and The Guardian.

Simply type or paste your text in the box below. Choose a genre and click submit for the results.

The Gender Genie

I read that there are certain differences between male and female writing styles and those are some of the things that the Gender Genie takes into account when trying to predict the gender of a writer. It's not going to always give the right answer, of course, but it is estimated that it predicts the gender correctly about 60 to 70 percent of the time.

I copy and pasted some of my longer posts from this forum into that website to test whether or not it guesses my gender correctly. I did it 3 times and the Gender Genie suggested that I was a male each time. Also, the more words you put inside the box, the more accurately it can predict the gender of the writer. The website says that the Genie works better when you submit a text of more than 500 words.

So, now you give it a try and post your results. Did the Gender Genie predict your gender correctly?

[Minimalist]

it predicts the gender correctly about 60 to 70 percent of the time.

Is that all that impressive since it is 50-50 to begin with?

[Annik]

Overall, it marked me female, but I did it 7 times and three of them, they concluded I was male.

[Rayaan]

Is that all that impressive since it is 50-50 to begin with?

Yeah, not really impressive, but still I find it a little interesting that a male writer may use certain words more frequently than a female writer (and vice versa).

[Minimalist]

I've been known to use "fuck" far more than most of the women.

[Shell B]

Me too, Min. Adrian is going to be very disappointed. It's a boy.

[Jackalope]

Holy shit, I'm a transexual android!

[KichigaiNeko]

meh

[Annik]

Is that all that impressive since it is 50-50 to begin with?

Yeah, not really impressive, but still I find it a little interesting that a male writer may use certain words more frequently than a female writer (and vice versa).

That's not entirely correct. I showed Hovik the generator and it confused him. Although he isn't a sociolinguist, he does know that attributing certain words to genders isn't correct. It is true that certain genders tend to use certain language, but word-for-word (especially function words) doesn't make sense.