I got eight out of ten. Which entitles me to say that this test is silly.
It made me think, though. I’m a professional writer, and I used to do a lot of ghostwriting: series fiction for kids and young adults.
The series for which I wrote the greatest number of books was aimed at preteen girls. The main characters were girls and most of the minor ones were too. I am male, as you can plainly see from my username :). I don’t think I was the only male ghostwriter who ever worked on these books, but I’m pretty sure I was the only one during the time that they were a part of my life.
Of course, I was “inheriting” characters and the relationships between them, and essentially asked to imitate the style of the other books in the series, so putting my own personal stamp on the books I wrote wasn’t the goal. And my editors would have taken out anything that seemed too obviously out of line for the series. Still, I suspect that each ghostwriter did certain things (particular phrasings, ways of structuring dialogue, the amount of attention given to physical description, that kind of thing) which a careful reader might notice. (“Aha! This rather unusual term appears in books 87, 96, and 102! And each of these books spends some time describing the earrings that some minor character or other is wearing! The same ghostwriter must have been responsible for all three!”)
Anyway, I’m curious about whether this “careful reader” could determine the gender of the various ghostwriters for the series. In particular, are there ways to tell that the books I wrote were written by a man? Or do the circumstances of trying to write a book about girls, for girls, based on the writings of a woman (the series creator, who wrote the first I-don’t-know-how-many books) make the gender of the ghostwriter impossible to identify?