Apr 06

Are you male or female? Gender Genie Lets you Know

Posted in: Today's Chili, Web Sites

This article was written on May 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

The first I had heard of Gender Genie was in our Forum when Max posted about it. Gender Genie is supposed to be able to determine the gender of an author by analyzing text using an algorithm. All you have to do is copy in a sample of the text, and it will give a male score, and a female score. If the female score is higher, then they presume the passage was written by a female, and visa versa.

Max tried it out with a post that Ryan wrote, and a post that I wrote, and it correctly determined that Ryan’s post was written by a male, and that my post was written by a female. Interesting, isn’t it? However a few of the people that tried it after didn’t have quite as much success. I thought I’d give it a try with tech bloggers around the web to see how well it could determine who wrote it:

  1. Go2Web2 by Orli Yakuel (female) – Gender Genie thinks this author is male.
  2. Techsploitation by Annalee Newitz (female) – Gender Genie thinks this author is male.
  3. TechCrunch by Michael Arrington (male)– Gender Genie thinks this author is female.
  4. GigaOm by Om Malik (male)– Gender Genie thinks this author is male.
  5. GigaOm by Katie Fehrenbacher (female) – Gender Genie thinks this author is male.
  6. Digg Blog by Kevin Rose (male) – Gender Genie thinks this author is female.
  7. Lifehacker by Gina Trapani (female) – Gender Genie thinks this author is female.
  8. Lifehacker by Adam Pash (male) – Gender Genie thinks this author is female.

After my eight different trials with four female writers, and four male writers, the results weren’t quite as good as I thought they would be. With female writers, it properly identified in one out of the four instances, and with males, it properly identified in one out of the four instances as well.

Gender Genie analyzes a passage by looking at words that it labels as masculine keywords and feminine keywords, however they all looked like common words that anybody would use.  For example, some of the masculine keywords that it looks for are: around, what, more, are, as , who, and below.  Examples of female keywords include: with, if, not, where, be, when, your, her we. All of those words seem like common words that anybody would use regularly, and not gender specific.

So maybe the Gender Genie is lacking with some of his magical powers? Regardless, it’s fun to try out.  Just find a passage that’s over 500 words (preferably) and copy and paste it into the Gender Genie to get your result.

 

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