Determining gender of author from writing
This is something I'd been thinking about for a while and was brought to the forefront of my mind by 
kaberett's male-perspective writing coursework.
A while ago on one of the Usenet groups I read, a person started posting regularly without specifying their gender. I barely noticed that they had never actually stated whether they were male or female, because to me it was just glaringly totally unavoidably obvious from their writing that they were male. Anyway, a bit later someone explicitly asked them whether they were male or female, and they refused to answer, and various other people started guessing. I was astounded at the number of people who thought the poster was female. In fact, I've just been and re-viewed the whole thread and the "female" guesses outweighed the "male" guesses by a significant factor.
Much later on, another post by the same poster made it obvious (given the previous context) that the poster was indeed male. Aside from thinking "hah, I was right" I didn't give it much else thought but it's been bubbling away in my brain for a while.
So, if anyone finds this topic interesting, leave an anonymous comment (either your own writing or someone else's) and I'll try and guess whether it was written by a male or a female author. Anyone else is welcome to add their guesses too, and I'd also be interested in any reasoning behind those guesses. The only rules are that the comment has to be long enough and relevant enough to give me a reasonable chance (posting a one-liner joke or an excerpt from your dishwasher instruction book does NOT count :-)). Something like "what I did at the weekend" or "what I did yesterday" would be ideal.
If you want you can (instead or as well) leave a comment where you try to write as the opposite gender.
kaberett's male-perspective writing coursework.A while ago on one of the Usenet groups I read, a person started posting regularly without specifying their gender. I barely noticed that they had never actually stated whether they were male or female, because to me it was just glaringly totally unavoidably obvious from their writing that they were male. Anyway, a bit later someone explicitly asked them whether they were male or female, and they refused to answer, and various other people started guessing. I was astounded at the number of people who thought the poster was female. In fact, I've just been and re-viewed the whole thread and the "female" guesses outweighed the "male" guesses by a significant factor.
Much later on, another post by the same poster made it obvious (given the previous context) that the poster was indeed male. Aside from thinking "hah, I was right" I didn't give it much else thought but it's been bubbling away in my brain for a while.
So, if anyone finds this topic interesting, leave an anonymous comment (either your own writing or someone else's) and I'll try and guess whether it was written by a male or a female author. Anyone else is welcome to add their guesses too, and I'd also be interested in any reasoning behind those guesses. The only rules are that the comment has to be long enough and relevant enough to give me a reasonable chance (posting a one-liner joke or an excerpt from your dishwasher instruction book does NOT count :-)). Something like "what I did at the weekend" or "what I did yesterday" would be ideal.
If you want you can (instead or as well) leave a comment where you try to write as the opposite gender.
* You are not authorized to reply to this protected entry.
Ah, this could be a problem for your survey.
Anyway, the post is public now so you really really really should be able to comment!
am I missing something
Did you see the New York Times article quite a while ago, about an algorithm for the prediction of gender based on a writer's lexical choices? The Gender Genie implements something based on that algorithm - paste in some text, and it'll try to predict your gender.
There was an LJ analyser using Gender Genie, which has now been accidentally deleted, but before it was, an LJ friend of mine,
You're right, though, the words it highlighted as male ones are very odd. "some", "this", "as", "now", "good" - bizarre. Similarly the female highlights: "than", "like", "so"....
But yes, my impression of the gender of the original Usenet poster I referred to was based on much more than the specific words he used.
By my english teacher friends tells me that it's blindingly obvious who a given paper belongs do, or when a student as copied. (She apparently went to her ratings on some web site and found that it said "DO NOT PLAGERIZE.")
Hey, give me break, this is LiveJournal not the British Journal of Science :-)
because topic choice tells you about the author as well, and your list is limited.
True, but I did say that it didn't have to be ones own writing that one pasted in, or that the writing had to be true fact.
FWIW I think this comment was posted by someone female but tomboy-type, perhaps
writing sample - an old Usenet post
What I didn't mention is that our dual LNB is hooked up to a 3x4 switch, which allows us to then run two sets of input to each reciever, one for each tuner. So you might say yes, we have four satellite feeds, but I wasn't thinking of it that way - I was thinking that what the previous poster meant was that you'd need two dual LNB satellite setups, which is clearly not the case.
Re: writing sample - an old Usenet post
Re: writing sample - an old Usenet post
I don't know who the commenter I am replying to is, though, but I'd guess
Re: writing sample - an old Usenet post
It was actually primarily the use of the word "clearly" that gave it away, plus a small input from the "misspoke and/or was confusing by accident" phrase.
Re: writing sample - an old Usenet post
That morning I went running as usual. At the summit of the hill, I could see the corn growing in long rows giving the hills the definition of a topographical map. Except this map did not lead me in the correct direction. It, instead, lead me to Thomas’s door.
As all discussions eventually do, this one morphed into a discussion about movies. Quentin Tarantino was a very popular figure at our lunch table.
To be fair, the discussion was between two males and two females, ages 23-32, all computer programmer-types. The other female at the table is former military, and therefore not a "girly-girl." So, you know, I was trying to be tricky. :)
Thanks for owning up! I am finding this very interesting.
Hmm, I seem to be guessing male every time. Perhaps the Gender Genie's tendency to over-guess male is forgiveable.
You mean you don't know the gender of "3 unknown" or they are asexual or hermaphrodite? [That doesn't look right... never mind]
Of course, genetic males can have predominantly female characteristics and genetic females can be male in character. All very confusing. It's unfair though that butch/macho women can wear male clothing without anybody turning a hair but woosy men can't get away with wearing a dress. Sigh.
I agree with you about how irritating it is that it's so much more accepted for women to dress as men than vice versa.
Your "biological female" has been a friend for 24 years or so. It's probably her journal that I got your name from.
I've never seen a foetus with a LJ account but as long as he's happy, I'm happy too.
Nice to meet you.
Looking at your friends list, I think I see who you are referring to but that wasn't who I was thinking of, and in fact re-thinking it made me think of another possibility too, so that's THREE females who self-identify as males on my list. Plus several others (including me!) who, while not actually self-identifying as male, have a lot of typically "male" characteristics.
Men don't want to have conversations about films as they're going on!
</stereotyping>
Go on then, guess
And it depends on whether the writing is non-fiction or fiction, I find.
How did you guess that person online?
Was it keywords or sentence structure or did they say "I am a bloke"? That is always a giveaway.
Re: Go on then, guess
As for how I guessed the person online, it was partly keywords (they repeatedly used the word "quack" to refer to a doctor, for example) and partly sentence structure. No, they didn't say "I am a bloke", in fact they were extremely evasive about whether or not they were a bloke :-))
Come to think of it, their evasiveness was part of what made me think "bloke", too. I think a woman would have just laughed that people hadn't worked it out and 'fessed up.