Writing and Gender

Here is something interesting to try. The "Gender Genie" is a program based off of "key words" that men and women are supposedly more likely to use in their writing. Based on your use of particular words, the Genie will predict if your fiction, non-fiction, or blog entry was written by a woman or a man. The statistics on the predictions are also available so you can see how accurate the Genie tends to be. There's a quite large margin of error, but I'll leave that to the math folks.

According to the Genie, I write like a boy. In my blogging, in my critical work, and (gasp) even in my poetry, I scored overwhelmingly male. In frustration I took three of my poems that deal most with women's issues and I did actually (just barely) score 10 points more on the "female" scale than on the "male" scale. Very odd. I don't take it too seriously. But I was suprised at the results.

If you decide to try this out, report back . I'm interested in seeing how others fare.