4/10.
5/10. The trend seems to be that people aren’t doing any better than a coin flip.
As far as the claim that women are dominating the writing of fiction these days, I believe that’s nonsense. Here’s some data showing that 75% of authors published by four publishing houses (chosen because they are focused on literary fiction) were male in 2011.
Next time I go to the library I’m going to randomly pick a row in the new arrivals section and count gendered names. I’d be extremely surprised if women are a majority.
Sorry, but this is just wrong. Sending out a sample to 50 agents, twice, with different names, and tabulating the responses is actual data.
Your impressions of which books you pick out at the library are not, unless you’re actually noting how many books at the library are written by men vs. women, not just the ones you happen to remember reading.
7:10, I’m ok with that. I think I would have scored worse if I read for content instead of for the vibe(???) I was getting.
I think it’s a little strange that I missed the John Irving passage. I mean, it’s been a while but I did read the book and should have known the school!
I was in my local library today, so I did a very brief sampling.
I picked two shelves in the “New Fiction” section and counted unique titles from male and female authors. I got 21 written by women, 19 written by men. Unique authors is 20/19 (one woman had two titles on the shelf). I looked at the book jacket to determine author gender when the name wasn’t a strongly-gendered one that I recognized (so, it’s possible I miscounted if there’s a woman writing under the name Eric, or a man writing as Melissa). The shelves are filed alphabetically by last name, which I think should be a fairly random sample.
It’s a small sample, but it doesn’t support the idea that the vast majority of new fiction is written by women.
I got 2/10. Then the test said “What are you, a girl or something?!”
When I first read The Fountainhead, knowing nothing about its author, I had assumed it was written by a man. I thought “Ayn” was an English name of sorts. Years later I had the opportunity to tell Ayn Rand about this. She gleefully took it as a tremendous compliment that she “wrote like a man.” She abhorred the idea of being known as a “lady author”.
By reading only the first line, I got 6/10. 
Yes, that does seem to be the general result, which makes me suspect that most people really aren’t good at telling a persons gender online.
I recently read several books by James Tiptree Jr/Alice Sheldon, I was aware that the author was female before reading so that was no surprise, although from several of the stories I did get the distinct vibe that they were written by someone experiencing gender identity issues though I’ve never heard of that being mentioned in regards to her.
Really? Ummm, that’s an odd thing for it to say, especially for the Guardian.
7/10. I didn’t recognize any of the passages and mainly was looking for the feeling/facts divide.
Or the passages in the quiz were selected to be hard to tell. There’s no reason to think that they were picked randomly.
4/10, and had no idea what defining criteria I should be looking for. I went by “tone”. A coin flip would have improved my results.
Same here.
I’m not a girl, though.
Do they dot their i’s with little hearts?
McSweeney’s has a relevant essay.
Try reading James Tiptree Jr.'s works, and then tell yourself that you can tell the author is a woman.
Had to look through your posts until I found one long enough (300 words) to analyze. Which gave it away before I could find one, but, I was using this analyzer, and fed it this post and it correctly ascertained you as female.
The samples in the OP test are not typical of the books I read. Maybe if I read more of that stuff, I’d be better at working working out those samples, but as it is, I’m mostly just guessing. Given the context, I think that the selection of authors was deliberate.
From the books I read, I would say that male authors generally inhabit their male characters better, and write about sex differetly. I don’t think that Atwood is an exception to that, but I do think that Joan Aiken sometimes was. Salmon Rushdie is just ~ different to most other authors ~ Perhaps that’s why he scored a Booker.
Huh, I changed ‘husband’ to ‘wife’ in that and changed every reference to clothing to manly man pursuits like hunting, firearms etc and it still came out as ‘weakly female’. Interesting, I suspected it was just picking up on stereotypically female words, apparently not.
I stuck the passages from the link in the OP through that analyser and it got some right, some were ambiguous (informal male and formal female or vice versa) though one passage from a female author came back firmly male. Edited to add that it did say most of the samples weren’t long enough to get a proper determination.
Well if this is directed at me I did mention her above.
Very true.
I heard a literary agent say that publishers have given up on male novelists because “men don’t buy novels.”
Phrasing?