Wednesday, January 11, 2006

I write like a man??

I think I've seen this before somewhere - The Gender Genie - but just stumbled across it again and tried it out. It's designed to predict the gender of a writer, based on a 500+ word sample of their text (eg. blog posts). And not just once, not just twice, not just three times... FOUR TIMES out of five it predicted I'm male. No, no, no (stuttering in indignation) I'm not!

What's going on? I tested the thing with some text from other people, and it got them right. It's just me! Why? Do my posts seem male to you? On second thoughts, better if you don't answer that, in case the answer is yes. And now you can't answer no either, because I'll think you're just being nice and suspect you mean the opposite... ;)

It's not like my results were even close, either: the last piece of text scored a big 2,836 male v. 1,813 female.

No offence to men, of course, but bloody hell.