My excellent good friend Nathan recently sent me this link:
Gender Analyzer
It's some kind of something that can allegedly determine your gender based on your blog. It's currently accurate 58% of the time (based on the self-reporting of the users). Is that impressive? Not very, but better than if it were total bunk.
How does it work anyway? The site only says it uses a "text classifier" that was "trained" on 4000 blogs. That implies that the makers of this thing don't really know what the substantive differences between the genders may be (uh, in terms of blog writing, obvs).
Still the whole idea of determining gender from writing raises questions like, Do women write a certain way and men another? Do men/women use certain nouns and verbs more often? Ask more questions? Use the word "feel" more often? Is it sentence length? Punctuation? Is it counting gendered pronouns? What if I put in the blog of a transgendered person?
Anywhoozle, one other interesting thing is the Gender Analyzer doesn't just say M or F, it gives a percentage of how M or F. I've put in most of the blogs I read, including mine, and most of them have come out as "quite gender neutral." One though, librarian.net, came out 98% female. Whoa. AND HERE IS THE CRAZY THING: librarian.net is written by a lady named Jessamyn who also has a personal blog and when I put that in, it came out 88% male. Oh, SNAP. Busted!
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