The Gender Genie

[A Black Falcon]

Well, according to the site the Gender Genie thing itself has been updated as recently as last year. That doesn't mean it actually works well, though. As I said, the idea seems pretty specious...

http://www.slumdance.com/blogs/brian_fle...00327.html



Evidently the guy who wrote it doesn't think it's too accurate either...

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/6501

Most of the time, people drop their writing into [The Gender Genie] and, when they don’t get the result they expect, declare it to be wrong, wrong, wrong. Yet, a lot of its users still find it and its analysis to be a fun time waster. Despite having written the program, I didn’t come up with the algorithm and believe that the Genie works no better than the flip of a coin. However, I don’t think it to be a complete time waster since there actually is some academic study that went into it.

In the most basic terms, the computational linguists behind the algorithm, Koppel and Argamon, took a bunch of fiction and looked for trends based on gender. Using complicated formulas, they determined that male writers tended to write more about specific things like an apple, a book, or the car. In contrast, female writers wrote about connections to things like my apple, your book, or our car. The nouns themselves (apple, book, car) didn’t matter much but the preceding qualifier, whether an article (a, an, the) or possessive (my, your, our), did.