Gender Genie
We were looking for information on female perspective versus the male perspective in writing. Instead, we came across an interesting program called “Gender Genie”. It was not exactly what we were looking for, but it occurred to us that this program could be used to test our story’s male/female point of views. We’re sure this program was probably not built to serve this purpose, but who’s to say it can’t be used this way?
So, going off to find the sections we wanted to test out, we copied and pasted the text written in a male perspective; and did the same with the female perspective. The male point of view was predicted to be male and the female point of view, female. Although this program may be just for fun, it did somewhat settle us, giving us a sort of confirmation that the perspectives didn’t sound too “girly” when it was supposed to be male or too much like a guy when it was supposed to be female.
Now, curious to see if this program could really accurately determine the gender of the author of a piece of writing, we decided to input a few pages of our formal writing into the text box—as it works best with 500+ words. It seems all our formal writing is significantly male so it failed that test (but then we have sneaking suspicion that analytical pieces would come out male for the objective, informative nature of formal writing—excuse the stereotyping). Then we tested out our blog entries. Out of eight entries, two came out female. It failed that test too.
Anyway, it might be interesting to see if your writing comes out the way you expect it to come out. At the bottom, we provided the link to this algorithm. Simply input the text into the text box there, select one of the radio buttons (fiction, non fiction, or blog entry) and press the ’submit’ button. We’ve been trying to find some formal writing—essays for example—written by females to see if most of them would come out male and prove our theory right, but have found little—actually next to nothing—published online.
We’d be interested to hear what you get if any of you have the time to post. Well, have fun!
Gender Genie
An algorithm developed to predict the gender of the author of a piece of writing.