Are You a Boy Blogger or Girl Blogger?

Here's a second-hand-link (via DebWire, via nightcrawler) I got a kick out of: The Gender Genie. By counting the number of times an author uses certain keywords in her/his text, it guesses whether the author is male or female.

For example, the more you uses words like him, so, because, since, and actually, the more likely it is to suggest that you are female, and when you use a lot of words like some, this, now, something, and the, it figures you're male. (This is perhaps the first text-crunching algorithm on the web to not ignore the word "the", but it does give the word a fairly low weight in the result.)

So I ran my last several entries through Genie, with interesting results:

Peter Pan - Also for Those Who've Grown Up:
Female Score: 1054
*Male Score: 1455
E-mail for Those Left Behind:
Female Score: 785
*Male Score: 1975
Paycheck - Taxes Withheld:
*Female Score: 1100
Male Score: 1062
Dear Santa: Bring Me a Man:
*Female Score: 1566
Male Score: 1407
Saddam Was Ready to Bomb Washington!:
Female Score: 217
*Male Score: 439
iTunes, not Tunez
Female Score: 1483
*Male Score: 1950

More often than not, it guessed that I am a boy, but a couple times it went the other way, guessing that I am a girl. But I'd still like to give it a perfect score.

That's because it wasn't trying to answer whether I had a penis or a vagina, or whether I was XX or XY. It's asking: male or female? That's a question about gender, which is more of a social construct than anything else. I don't use a certain word more often than another because my crotch has a spongy cylinder sticking out of it, but because of the way I was actually raised, and - perhaps even more importantly - because of the role I am playing at the time I am writing.

The entry which skewed strongest toward "male" was my sarcastic belittling of the fundie who promises to send e-mails to your loved ones after you've been taken up in the Rapture. I was in full-on "guy" mode there, and it seems to show in Genie's score on that text. The next-malest was my rant about the latest revelation of Bush's lies to the American people. Same thing.

By contrast, I skewed slightly female on the essay where I asked Santa to bring me a realistic toy boy. Not for the literal reason that I was asking for a man (Genie doesn't detect abstract content), but probably because I was feeling rather "girlish" as I wrote it.

As another test, I ran my entries through Genie in batches by category. Most of them came up with a noticeable bias toward "male", but when I gave it the "Me" category to analyse, the difference between male and female was less than 1% of the total. It nearly guessed that I am a woman. Which makes perfect sense, since our idea of "female" includes someone who's comfortable talking about her feelings. That's what I'm more likely to be doing in those entries. I was being female. And I'm OK with that.

Which is good, because I just ran the above text through Genie, and the result was:
Female Score: 1674
Male Score: 884